Matteo Bertoli

I study political extremism and populism, political selection, and the development of state capacity. My research asks how institutions and incentives shape who enters public office, how officeholders behave once in office, and how these processes feed back into democratic accountability and the quality of the state. Across projects, I study both elected politicians and bureaucrats, combining causal inference, administrative and historical data, and multilingual text-as-data methods. My work spans comparative politics, political economy, and political methodology.

My job market paper, “Extremism Is Self-Undermining, but Populism Is Not,” asks whether holding office strengthens or weakens the long-term appeal of right-wing extremism and populism. Using Italian mayoral platforms, supervised text classification, and a close-election design adapted to continuous candidate traits, I separate populist rhetoric from extreme-right ideology and estimate their consequences in office. I find that extreme-right incumbency is self-undermining: the next municipal election shifts toward more moderate candidates. Support for extreme-right parties also appears to decline in subsequent national and European elections. By contrast, populist incumbency does not weaken the subsequent appeal of populism. The difference appears to reflect behavior in office: extreme-right mayors behave like ideologues, cutting welfare even at electoral cost, whereas populist mayors act more like office-seekers, expanding welfare where re-election incentives remain. Treating the two as a single “populist radical right” bundle masks both effects.

Two further projects extend this agenda. The first asks whether the rewards of office shape political selection. Exploiting population thresholds that raise Brazilian mayoral salaries discontinuously, I show that higher pay reduces the share of candidates classified as extreme right. The second, joint with Alexander Lee and Anil Menon, turns from politicians to the state itself. Using a new dataset of every British central government employee from 1660 to 1860, we study when and why the state grew not only in size but in quality, acquiring the features of a modern bureaucracy: payment by salary rather than fees, greater specialization, and reduced nepotism.

Before coming to Rochester, I completed an M.A. in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University. Outside of research, I enjoy cooking, hiking, and scuba diving.