Mads Elkjær

Biography

Mads Elkjaer square photo

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the WEALTHPOL Project in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and at Nuffield College. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern Denmark in December 2019. I spent one of the three years of my degree as a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Harvard University (academic year 2017-2018).

My research lies in the fields of comparative politics and political economy, focusing on political representation, economic inequality, and redistribution. In particular, I engage with questions of how rising economic inequality affects the distribution of political power and influence in advanced democracies.

In my PhD dissertation 'Inequality and Political Representation', I argue that despite the rise in inequality over the last four decades, political power and influence, still, lie comfortably with the middle class. I suggest that recent alarming findings indicating that democracy is being undermined by a rising influence of the affluent may just reflect asymmetries in information across economic classes, as opposed to inequalities in substantive political representation, and I find evidence to that effect. Thus far, two of the papers from my dissertation have been accepted for publication in World Politics and Comparative Political Studies (February 2020).