Ari Ray

Ari Ray (born 1991 in Lund, Sweden) is a political scientist. She examines how electoral institutions affect the social class composition of legislatures—and whether the social classes of elected officials influence economic policymaking. Her research draws heavily on insights from other social scientific disciplines, including applied economics, cognitive psychology, and micro-sociology.

Ari received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2020. While completing her doctoral work, she was a visiting researcher at Stanford University (2017–2018). Before joining the Collegium, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2019–2020) and a senior researcher at the University of Geneva (2020–2023). Ari’s projects have been supported by several funding bodies, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Swiss Institute in Rome. Upon completing her fellowship at the Collegium, she will return to the University of Geneva as an SNSF Ambizione grantee.