Matteo Bertoli

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Rochester, specializing in comparative politics, political economy, and political methodology, with a substantive focus on political extremism, populism, and state capacity.

My job market paper, “Extremism Is Self-Undermining, but Populism Is Not,” studies whether holding office weakens or strengthens anti-establishment politics. Using a new dataset of Italian mayoral candidate platforms, fine-tuned multilingual text classifiers, and a close-election research design, I separate two traits often bundled together: populism and extreme-right ideology. The paper shows that extreme-right incumbency produces electoral backlash: voters shift toward more moderate alternatives in the next municipal election. Populist incumbency, by contrast, produces no comparable punishment and is associated with later gains for the main populist party in national and European elections. I argue that this asymmetry arises because extreme-right mayors govern as ideologues, pursuing welfare retrenchment even at electoral cost, while populist mayors behave more like office-seekers, expanding visible benefits when re-election incentives remain.

Before Rochester, I earned an M.A. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.