I am a final-year DPhil candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. My research interests lie in the fields of Political Economy and Comparative Politics. I focus on two main areas: authoritarian politics and legacies, and democratization-related issues.

My doctoral project uses a top-down rational choice approach to determine how legacies of autocratic regimes shape extremism after transitions to democracy. I am broadly interested in the economic legacies of autocracies, who gets to democratize and why, economic and material autocratic stabilisation mechanisms, threats to advanced democracies from an elite perspective, how the abundance of information affects rational voting decisions, European politics, and electoral behaviour. Methodologically, I’m interested in quantitative methods, and quasi-experimental designs.

I am the recipient of a Full Scholarship granted by the FCT, the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology, with full funding until February 2022.

Before joining the University of Oxford I briefly worked in journalism and consultancy. I read for an MA in Governance, Leadership and Democracy Studies (Summa cum laude) at the Institute for Political Studies of the Catholic University of Portugal, with a full scholarship awarded by the Fundação Oriente. I hold a B.Sc. in Business Administration from the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics.

In addition to academia, I moonlight as a Dystopian Fiction writer. I am working on my first novel The Supreme Purpose.

You can find here a copy of my CV. Get in touch with me at catarina.leao@politics.ox.ac.uk or on Twitter at @catarinalion.