Additional Information
Personal Website
Biography
Interest Areas
Class Analysis, Populism, Nationalism, Social Movements, Quantitative Methods.
Description
My research examines the relationship between social class and political mobilization in Europe and the United States. In one stream of work, I develop a method for operationalizing Erik Olin Wright’s neo-Marxist class schema using standard British occupational data, and validate the resulting framework against established alternatives. In a second stream, I investigate how class position shapes populist, nationalist, and authoritarian orientations, drawing on latent class analysis, survey experiments, and comparative case studies.
My dissertation, The British Class Matrix, reconstructs and validates Wright’s “contradictory class locations” framework using British occupational data, and applies it to questions of populist mobilization. As Lead Researcher on Cluster III of the ENDURE project, I designed a six-country survey experiment testing the causes of populist, ethnonationalist, and authoritarian attitudes across the UK, US, Germany, Poland, Croatia, and Brazil. I am also lead editor of a forthcoming volume on democratic socialism in global perspective, based on an international conference I organized at UW–Madison in partnership with the Transnational Institute and Havens Wright Center.
Previous degrees
MSc Sociology, University of Edinburgh, 2013. MA (Hons) Political Science, University of Glasgow, 2009.
Publications
Ramand, Peter and Kristinn Már Ársælsson. 2026. “Politics After the Pandemic: Attitudes to Democracy, Authoritarianism, Protest and the ‘Culture War’ Across Six Countries.” ENDURE Project Research Report. https://www.endure-project.org/
Ramand, Peter. 2024. “From Class Analysis to Real Utopias and Back Again: Erik Olin Wright in Conversation with Left Populism.” In Engaging Erik Olin Wright: Between Class Analysis and Real Utopias, edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman. London: Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3084-engaging-erik-olin-wright
Foley, James and Peter Ramand. 2018. “In Fear of Populism: Referendums and Neoliberal Democracy.” Socialist Register 54. https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/issue/view/1899
Foley, James and Peter Ramand. 2014. Yes: The Radical Case for Scottish Independence. London: Pluto Press. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/yes/
Ramand, Peter and Jamie Maxwell, editors. 2014. Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times: The Selected Works of Tom Nairn. Edinburgh: Luath Press. https://luath.co.uk/products/tom-nairn-old-nations-auld-enemies-new-times