Tiziana Caponio, Ph.D. in Political Science, is Professor at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin (Italy), Fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto and FIERI. She has been Marie Curie Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute (2018-2020) and served as co-chair of the IMISCOE Standing Committee on “Migration Politics and Governance” (www.imiscoe.org) between 2019 and 2022. She is currently PI of the ERC Advanced project ‘Theorizing the Drivers of the Asylum-Far Right Nexus in Rural Europe – Mind-the-NEXUS’ (GA 101200424). Between 2021 and 2024 she coordinated the research project Whole-COMM (“Exploring the integration of post-2014 migrants in small and medium-sized towns and rural areas from a whole-of-community perspective”), funded by the Horizon2020 Programme of the European Commission. Her research interests regard migration policy and policymaking processes in a multilevel governance perspective, with a specific attention to the role of municipalities and their interactions with supra-national and national governments on the one hand, and with NGOs and civil society organisation on the other. She has published extensively in several international peer-reviewed journals (including Governance, Local Government Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and others). Among her recent books: Making Sense of the Multilevel Governance of Migration. City Networks facing global mobility challenges, Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan (2022); Handbook on Migrants Integration in Small and Medium-sized Towns and Rural Areas, editor with Eduardo Barberis and Ruth McAreavey, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (2026).
Education
PhD in Political Studies, University of Milan, 2014
Research Interests
Social Stratification, Sociology of Education, Comparative Sociology, Quantitative Methods
Teaching
Tutorial in Social and Political Sciences
Applied Statistics for Social and Political Sciences
Advanced Research Design
Public Policy Evaluation
Selected Works
Studiare da straniero. Immigrazione e diseguaglianze nei sistemi scolastici europei, Il Mulino, 2021.
Overeducation, Labor Market Dynamics, and Economic Downturn in Europe, European Sociological Review, 2019.
Different systems, same inequalities? Post-compulsory education and young adults’ literacy in 18 OECD countries, Journal of European Social Policy, 2017.
Moreno Mancosu is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Turin and Affiliate at the Collegio Carlo Alberto. His research focuses on political behavior and public opinion, with particular attention to political communication, conspiracy beliefs, and misinformation
Dr. Eliška Drápalová is a comparative political scientist and public administration scholar specializing in local politics, urban governance, and the quality of government. She is currently affiliated with the University of Turin and works on the MIND-the-NEXUS project, which examines the relationships between migration, asylum governance, and far-right politics in Europe. She obtained her PhD in Political Economy from the European University Institute in Florence and previously held research positions at WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Hertie School, and the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on cities and local governance, with particular attention to populism, political behavior, regulation, and the local dynamics of migration and social change.
Fabio Torreggiani is a research fellow at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Turin. His research studies how the interplay between individual information processing and social mechanisms shapes public discourse. He has worked on misinformation, social norms, institutional trust, media consumption, and agenda-setting. He uses a combination of survey experiments, regression analysis, scraping, and text analysis techniques. Before joining the Mind the Nexus team, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento. He earned his PhD in Economic Sociology and Labour Studies at NASP, University of Milan, in collaboration with the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, with a thesis that tested different social and cognitive mechanisms underlying misinformation beliefs.
Elisa Siragusa has a background in International Relations and Social and Political Sciences, and her research interests include migration governance, asylum reception systems, and local political dynamics. Within the project, she is contributing to literature review, cross-country data collection and harmonisation, methodological work, and preliminary comparative analyses.
Giacomo Gallegati is a postdoctoral researcher at Collegio Carlo Alberto. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto, in joint supervision with the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His research combines quasi-experimental and experimental methods to study topics in labour economics and political economy, including crime, education, multi-level governance, institutional trust and political extremism.
Can Mutlu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Economy and Government program at Harvard University. His primary research fields are Political Economy, Comparative Politics, and American Politics. His teaching experience and interests are in political economy, formal theory and game theory.
He is on the 2026–27 academic job market and his job market paper is On the Rationale for Abstention: Partial Punishment Without Ticket Splitting.
In his research, he uses empirical methods and formal theory to study voter, candidate, and party behavior, and how electoral institutions shape these behaviors. He is also a founding member of the Americans Vote project, a group of researchers digitizing and standardizing Cast Vote Record data in the United States. His research has been published in Nature Scientific Data and the American Political Science Review.
He is currently a Graduate Affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS), and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), and a recipient of the Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Prior to his Ph.D., he earned an M.Sc. in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a B.Sc. in Economics and Mathematics from Haverford College.
Alice Cavalieri is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin, with experience across Italian and European universities. Her research focuses on public budgeting, European multilevel governance, and women’s representation. Her first book, Italian Budgeting Policy. Between Punctuations and Incrementalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), has been awarded in 2024 the “Pietro Grilli di Cortona” biannual prize for the best book published by a SISP member within 12 years from the completion of the PhD. She is a member of the Italian team of the Comparative Agendas Project and former country lead for Italy of the OxCGRT led by the Blavatnik School of Government (University of Oxford). Her works have been published in journals such as the Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Integration, Policy Studies Journal, South European Society & Politics, and several other international peer-reviewed journals. She is an Associate Editor of the open-access academic journal Interdisciplinary Political Studies (IdPS).
Viktoriia Tomnyuk is a research fellow within the PRIN-PNRR project “The Perpetual Refugee Crisis in Italy and Beyond” at the CPS Department of the University of Turin. She obtained her PhD in Innovation for the Circular Economy in 2025 from the University of Turin. Her research focuses on migration, refugee reception, spatial inequalities, and territorial development, with a specific focus on Italy.
Robin Piazzo holds a PhD in Sociology and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin. His research interests span political behaviour and political communication, with publications focusing on digital collective action, political parties, public spheres, and emergency communication. His work explores how digital technologies reshape political participation and democratic processes.
Andrea Pettrachin, PhD, is Assistant Professor (RTT) in Political Science at the University of Padua (Italy). He holds a PhD in Politics awarded in 2020 by the University of Sheffield, and has been postdoctoral researcher at the European University Institute, the Collegio Carlo Alberto, and the Universities of Bologna and Turin, working in five European research projects. Between 2021 and 2024 he worked on the scientific coordination of the Horizon project ‘Whole-COMM’, together with the project PI prof. Tiziana Caponio. His research mostly focuses on migration policy and governance, across different governmental levels. As of March 2026, he has published a monograph with Palgrave Macmillan and 26 articles in international academic journals, including, among others, the Journal of European Public Policy, Policy Sciences, Policy Studies, Governance, Public Policy and Administration and the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. In 2025 he was awarded the ‘Lasswell Prize’ for the best article published in Policy Sciences in 2024 and the ‘Best Junior Scholar’ prize of the Italian Journal of Public Policy. Starting from September 2026 he will be the PI of the 5-year project ‘The Politics of Migration in Third Countries: Negotiating the Externalisation of Asylum Processing’ (MIGPOT), funded by the Italian Science Fund.
Giacomo Solano is Senior Assistant Professor in Migrant Inclusion at the Nijmegen School of Management, Department of Economics and Business Economics. He is affiliated to the Radboud University Network on Migrant Inclusion (RUNOMI). He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam and University of Milan-Bicocca (joint degree). His research interests include social and labour market integration of migrants, comparative integration policies, social dynamics in developing countries and social network analysis. In the past, he worked for the Migration Policy Group (MPG) as Head of Research, the European Commission (DG Employment), the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and the Eindhoven University of Technology (as post-doc researcher).
Gustav Lidén (Ph.D. in Political Science, 2011) has a background in comparative politics with a specific interest in the local political arena. During 2012 and 2013, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Sciences at Mid Sweden University. Lidén has been an Associate Professor (Docent) in Political Science at Mid Sweden University since 2014, with a promotion to Professor in 2026. Lidén’s research focuses on the local political arena, where he conducts comparative examinations of governance and policy output. His areas of particular focus include migration policy. One of his most important contributions is a monograph titled Local Migration Policy – Governance Structures and Policy Output in Swedish Municipalities (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).
Thomas Lacroix is a geographer, CNRS director of research at the Centre for International Research of Sciences Po Paris and a fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Thomas Lacroix works on the social and spatial aspects of transnational migratory worlds and the way they affect states and territories. His research focuses more specifically on the formation of city networks on migration issues and their influence on both local reception policies and the international governance of migration. He has published some fifteen books and special issues of journals, including, with Amandine Desille, International Migrations and Local Governance. A Global Perspective (Palgrave 2018), with Amandine Desille, International Migrations and Local Governance. A Global Perspective (Palgrave 2018), The Transnational Society (Palgrave 2023) and the Transnational State (Palgrave 2024) and Death in Migration (Bristol 2026).
Alessio D’Angelo is Professor of Public and Social Policy at the University of Derby (UK), where he co-directs the Centre for Applied Social Sciences, Policy Practice and Research (CASSPPR). He has extensive experience in conducting research on social inequalities, migration, diversity and related social and policy issues. His methodological expertise includes quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods research, with a particular interest in Social Network Analysis. Within the British Sociological Association, he convenes the Social Network Analysis Study Group (SNAG). Professor D’Angelo has published extensively on migration and refugee policy, including at comparative level across Europe. He is also editor of the journal Social Policy and Society (Cambridge University Press) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Social Policy Association (SPA).
For information about the project, research activities or collaborations, please contact the project team.
