Ranjit Lall

N4-3 St. John's College

St. Giles', Oxford

OX1 3JP

United Kingdom

I am an Associate Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Relations and a Fellow of St John's College at the University of Oxford.

My research focuses on the political economy of international cooperation, development, and technological change. My book Making International Institutions Work seeks to understand why some international institutions perform better than others. I also have methodological interests in machine learning and the analysis of missing data.

I received my PhD in Government from Harvard University and my BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Oxford. My research has received the Merze Tate Award from the American Political Science Association and the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. Before my PhD, I worked as an economist at the Bank of England and an editorial writer at the Financial Times.

selected publications

BJPS
Varieties of Anxieties: Disaggregating Emotion and Voting Behavior in the COVID-19 Era

Ranjit Lall, and David Vilalta

British Journal of Political Science 2025

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How does anxiety influence voting behavior? Whereas anxiety is usually treated as a uni- dimensional emotion, we highlight the multiplicity of socially contingent forms it can assume in response to societal threats. Different anxieties, we posit, can create distinct axes of political competition along which anxious voters exhibit widely varying preferences. We illustrate our argument with unique observational and experimental survey data from Spain’s COVID-19 crisis, showing that individuals anxious about the pandemic’s health consequences favored parties advocating stringent lockdown restrictions, whereas indi- viduals anxious about its economic disruption preferred parties opposing such measures. Analyzing municipality-level results from Madrid’s 2021 regional election, we addition- ally provide evidence that COVID-19 boosted support for pro-lockdown parties in areas more exposed to its health effects and support for anti-lockdown parties in areas more ex- posed to its economic impact. Our findings point to the importance of disaggregating complex emotional states for understanding the determinants of voting behavior.
@article{lall2025bjps, title = {Varieties of Anxieties: Disaggregating Emotion and Voting Behavior in the COVID-19 Era}, author = {Lall, Ranjit and Vilalta, David}, journal = {British Journal of Political Science}, pages = {1--41}, year = {2025}, }
AJPS
Making Global Governance Accountable: Civil Society, States, and the Politics of Reform

Ranjit Lall

American Journal of Political Science 2025

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Recent decades have witnessed the adoption of unprecedentedly broad and inclusive accountability mechanisms by many major international institutions, from grievance redress systems to transparency policies. What explains the establishment of these mechanisms — and why have only some institutions embraced them? I argue that adoption is more likely when member states, in particular the most powerful, face “bottom-up” pressures for accountability from dense transnational civil society networks — networks with the capacity to build leverage through agenda setting, coalition building, and advocacy strategies — and when institutions perform governance tasks that are costly to monitor. Analysis of a rich new dataset shows that adoption is positively related to the density of international nongovernmental organizations in an institution’s issue area — including only those based in powerful member countries — and that this relationship is stronger when governance tasks entail high monitoring costs. Statistical tests are complemented by qualitative evidence from interviews and other primary sources.
@article{lall2025ajps, title = {Making Global Governance Accountable: Civil Society, States, and the Politics of Reform}, author = {Lall, Ranjit}, journal = {American Journal of Political Science}, volume = {69}, number = {1}, pages = {96--117}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.1111/ajps.12824}, url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12824}, publisher = {Wiley Online Library}, }