Joan Ricart-Huguet
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland and a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Program on Ethics, Politics, & Economics at Yale University. I received my Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University as a recipient of la Caixa Graduate Fellowship.
I study comparative politics and historical political economy. My interests are wide-ranging and include political elites, colonial investments and legacies, education, and culture, with a regional focus on Africa. My work has been published or accepted at the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Historical Political Economy, Public Choice, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Studies in Comparative International Development.
Prior to receiving my PhD, I worked as a consultant for Princeton's Innovations for Successful Societies in Mexico and as a short-term consultant in Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank.
Research summary
My work shows how human capital and culture can fundamentally affect government formation, development, and elite identity. The first part of my research agenda stems from my dissertation and is focused on political elites. I investigate why power is often so unequally distributed between a country’s regions (i.e., regional political inequality). I leverage the brief but intense and extractive colonial period in East and West Africa to examine the impact of colonialism on government formation and regional political inequality today. Existing research on cabinet formation focuses on short-term bargaining. Instead, I provide evidence that levels of colonial education across districts, rather than other investments or population, explain why some districts have more ministers than others after independence and even today. In turn, I provide evidence that pre-colonial trade is an important cause of the very high inequality in public investments during the colonial period between and within states. Finally, I argue that colonial inequality persists today in part because political elites have often reproduced inequality (via distributive politics) rather than reduced inequality (via redistribution). Combined, my work provides a central antecedent to a large literature that links political elites to conflict, distributive politics, and regional favoritism.
The second part of my research agenda studies the role of culture in identity formation. I leverage a natural experiment in the cradle of East African elites, Makerere University in Uganda, where students are randomly assigned to live in halls of residence that have distinct cultures (one being more rowdy and activist, another more gentlemanly and reserved). My findings reveal that some behaviors and identity can be influenced by a relatively brief exposure to a new cultural environment (the effects of culture). The setting also allows me to study why different cultures across halls emerge to begin with given that all halls share a common institutional environment (the origins of culture).
