Introduction

My name is Jacob Nyrup, and I work as an associate professor at University of Oslo. I am also the PI of the ERC-funded project GETGOV and the co-founder of the WhoGov-project. Furthermore, I am affiliated with the projects ELDAR and WEALTHPOL. I hold a DPhil in Politics from Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where I am also an Associate Member.

My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and other journals. I mostly work within comparative politics and political economy. You can find my CV here.

Bio and research interests

I have a broad range of research interest, including authoritarian regimes, political elites, wealth inequality, and Danish municipalities. To most people these topics seem incompatible and weirdly unrelated. Nonetheless, my choice of research is not the result of a completely random walk.

I did my first master’s degree at London School of Economics, where I studied statistics and political economy. Here, I wrote my thesis on coalition formation in Danish Municipalities. This may sound dull to most people, but it actually concerns a fairly important issue; how is power distributed following an election? Furthermore, it opened up my eyes to the ocean of data, which is available on elections in Danish municipalities. My research on Danish municipalities includes the paper Confident and cautious candidates: Explaining under-representation of women in Danish municipal politics (With Malte Dahl), and another article on the inclusion of extreme parties in local government witten with Martin Vinæs Larsen and Frederik Hjorth. As part of this project we have build the most comprehensive database on local elections in Denmark.

After finishing my master’s degree, I went on to do another at University of Copenhagen. Here, I took courses in development economics and comparative regime types. I found that, while there is a big body on literature on institutions in democracies, the literature on authoritarian regimes is lacking. Therefore, I decided to apply for a Ph.D., focusing on authoritarian regimes. My research on authoritarian regimes includes the papers Performance and Promotions in an Autocracy (with Lasse Aaskoven) and The Morning After: Cabinet Instability and the Purging of Ministers after Failed Coup Attempts in Autocracies (with Laure Bokobza, Suthan Krishnarajan, Casper Sakstrup, and Lasse Aaskoven).

While working on my Ph.D., I realized that there was little available data on political elites in autocracies, and I therefore started building a dataset on governing elites - both in autocracies and democracies - together with Stuart Bramwell. This got a bit out of hand and resulted in the WhoGov dataset which is presented in the article Who Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets. WhoGov won the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Data Set Award 2021. Later on, we added additional information on the social background of cabinet members, resulting in the Paths to Power dataset.

I began my Ph.D. at Oxford in October 2016. I had Ben Ansell as my supervisor. Here, I got affiliated with the WEALTHPOL-project, and I therefore also work on wealth inequality. As a part of the project I have, amongst other things, co-authored the paper Sheltering Populists? House Prices and the Support for Populist Parties (With Ben Ansell, Martin Vinæs Larsen and Frederik Hjorth). This article won the APSA European Politics and Society section Best Article Award 2022.

E-mail:

Phone No.: 0045 51342188

Bluesky: @jacobnyrup.bsky.social

LinkedIn: jacob-nyrup

Google Scholar: Jacob Nyrup