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 examines 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 beginning my PhD, I worked as an economist at the Bank of England and an editorial writer at the Financial Times .

selected publications

CPS
Right-Wing Populism and the COVID-19 Shock: Evidence from Early Superspreader Events

Ranjit Lall, Thomas R. Davidson, and Felix Hagemeister

Comparative Political Studies 2026

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Can public health shocks boost right-wing populism? We investigate how the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted support for populists in Western Europe, an unresolved debate on which surprisingly little systematic evidence exists. Building on theories of populist mobilization in societal crises, we hypothesize a positive aggregate effect driven by declining confidence in public institutions, intensifying hostility toward outgroups, and opposition to government restrictions. Exploiting variation in local COVID-19 incidence stemming from the idiosyncratic timing of early superspreader events, we find a rise in online engagement with populists in regions with higher infection rates. We document a similar increase in populist support in the 2020 French municipal elections and in representative British and Dutch survey data. These varied sources corroborate our three posited mechanisms while casting doubt on possible alternative economic, social, and psychological channels. The findings broaden our understanding of the types of societal shocks that foster extreme politics.
@article{lall2026cps, title = {Right-Wing Populism and the COVID-19 Shock: Evidence from Early Superspreader Events}, author = {Lall, Ranjit and Davidson, Thomas R. and Hagemeister, Felix}, journal = {Comparative Political Studies}, pages = {1--44}, year = {2026}, }
APSR
Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe

Volha Charnysh, and Ranjit Lall

American Political Science Review 2026

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We investigate the developmental consequences of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe, the largest source of slaves in the early modern world after West Africa. Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least five million people were captured from hundreds of locations across Eastern Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies’ resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related indicators of demographic and commercial development. Consistent with our posited mechanism, raided areas constructed more robust defensive infrastructures and attained higher levels of military, administrative, and fiscal capacity. Our findings suggest that the structure of slave production conditions its developmental legacies, cautioning against drawing generalizations from the African context.
@article{charnysh2026apsr, title = {Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe}, author = {Charnysh, Volha and Lall, Ranjit}, journal = {American Political Science Review}, pages = {1--23}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.1017/S0003055426101439}, url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/consequences-of-the-black-sea-slave-trade-longrun-development-in-eastern-europe/E6074298B3135E3B858CF9E64BE45F99#article}, publisher = {Cambridge University Press}, }