Ryan Pike
Bio
Ryan Pike is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Economy and Society Initiative at UC Berkeley, working in the Climate and Green Industrial Strategy team. His research interests lie in the comparative and international political economy of climate change. Two overarching questions guide his research: First, how does climate change and policy reshape democratic politics? And, second, how do states and business bargain over the politics of economic transformation? His dissertation project studied how production site agglomeration shapes the politics and policy of industrial decarbonization in terms of firm lobbying, firm collaboration on infrastructure, and the local electoral consequences of green investment. A core insight from this research is that climate politics, especially industrial decarbonization, is structured by geography: firms operating in dense areas of industrial production behave differently from their more isolated peers. Individuals in the industrial heartland, moreover, react in a different fashion to state-led green investment compared to elsewhere, rewarding incumbents. Methodologically, he combines causal inference, text analysis, survey experiments, and fieldwork to assess these questions. His work has been published or is accepted at Government and Opposition and World Politics.