Our former research assistant, Guillem Amatller Dómine, successfully defended his doctoral thesis this past July 11th, 2024 as part of the Political and Social Sciences doctoral programme at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His thesis, The Political dynamics of technological change: Building States with Technology, was co-supervised by Aina Gallego Dobón and EthnicGoods principal investigator Matthias vom Hau.
A key member of our team from the onset, Guillem has spent the last years examining political dynamics of technological change as part of his PhD. In particular, he relied on quantitative methods to explore political causes behind the advent of new technologies and the consequences that these have brought about.
As part of his thesis, he also conducted research with our PI Matthias vom Hau, demonstrating the effects of state information capacity on ethnic fractionalization and public goods provision. His findings relate to the work of EthnicGoods, which investigates the consequences of different nation-building strategies and historical differences in state capacity on ethnic heterogeneity and development. His thesis further backs up the main argument proposed by EthnicGoods, which maintains that the relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision is often spurious and not necessarily negatively predetermined as often claimed by a large part of academia and certain political groups.
Since collaborating with us, Guillem has been working for the Generalitat de Catalunya. We are immensely proud of him and his work and we would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his contribution to EthnicGoods as well.
Good luck Guillem!
