Rafaela Dancygier is Professor of Politics and Public and International Affairs and Director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University. She specializes in the comparative politics of advanced democracies. Her research examines how social and economic divides interact with party politics and shape electoral alignments and political conflict in Europe and the United States. Her first book Immigration and Conflict in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2010) explains how immigration regimes and local political economies determine whether or not immigration destinations witness conflict between immigrants and natives, between immigrants and the state, or no conflict at all. Her second book, Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017) examines how minority groups are incorporated into politics and explores the consequences of this inclusion for the nature of party politics, electoral cleavages and gender equality. Her articles cover topics such as hate crime, immigrant integration, radical right populism, gender equality, and housing crises and gentrification. They have appeared in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Politics and elsewhere.

Immigration and Conflict was awarded the Best Book Award by the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and it was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Dilemmas of Inclusion won the 2018 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research and the 2019 Luebbert Prize, awarded by APSA to the best book published in comparative politics in the previous two years. Her articles on related topics have been awarded Best Paper Prizes by APSA’s Sections on Comparative Politics; Migration and Citizenship;  European Politics and Society; and Representation and Electoral Systems.