Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. I am currently part of two projects funded by the Swedish Research Council. The first project, “The Rich and the Social Contract” (with Robert Klemmensen and Erik Wengström), uses survey and register data to examine the views of Sweden’s top 1% of income earners on redistribution, inequality, meritocracy, and democracy. The second project, “Imperial Capacity: Studying the Impacts of Colonial Bureaucracies on State Development” (with Sarai-Anne Ikenze and Ted Svensson”, analyses the development of the British Colonial Office and its consequences for state capacity in both the colonies and the imperial centre.

I am also the PI (with Oriol Sabaté) for the project “The Politics of State Building: Studying Investments in State Capacity through Legislative Debates”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2025). Prior to this, I led a project on “The deliberative Capacity of Democratic Systems” (2018-2023), funded by the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. From 2015 to 2018, I was a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the project “State-Making and the Origins of Global Order in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond” (STANCE) also at Lund University.

My research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, political development, and democratic theory, with regional specializations on the politics of Latin America and Western Europe.

I am particularly interested in the relationship between democracy and development. Most of my work to this date can be grouped under three general topics:

  1. processes of state formation in the Atlantic World;
  2. the development of deliberative systems from a historical institutionalist perspective; and
  3. democratic attitudes, normative tensions and ideological change.

My research has been published in journals such as Citizenship Studies, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of Institutional Economics, Politics & Society, Social Science History, and the Review of International Organizations. A full list of my publications is available here.

I moonlight as a novelist. My first book of fiction, La frase negra, was published by Ediciones ERA in Mexico in 2007.

Research

In my doctoral (UBC) and post-doctoral (STANCE, Lund) work, I have studied the development of the modern state during the 19th and 20th centuries. I am currently working on a book manuscript on the role of national legislatures in the development of modern states in Europe and the Americas.

I have a strong interest on the empirical study of deliberative democracy, especially from an institutionalist perspective. From 2018 to 2023, I led a project on the “Deliberative Capacity of Democratic Systems”. The project aims to (1) identify the institutional characteristics of public spheres among contemporary democracies, (2) explain historically this institutional variation, and (3) examine the effects of institutional differences on the quality of democracy and democratic attitudes.

Relatedly, I am also part of several projects on the tensions between different normative ideals (e.g., popular sovereignty, freedom, solidarity, social justice, etc.) related to democracy and how these tensions shape democratic attitudes and public policies.

Recent publications

Sabaté, Oriol and Agustín Goenaga. (Forthcoming) “The Rise of Modern Police Forces in the United Kingdom: Tracking Legislative Debates around Police Reform (1803-1945),” Social Science History, In press.

Goenaga, Agustín and Michael A. Hansen. (2025) “Are Competent Citizens Critical Democrats? Political Resources, Motivated Reasoning and Evaluations of Democratic Institutions,” Social Science Journal, Online first.

Hassing-Nielsen Julie and Agustín Goenaga. (2025). “Back to Business? Business-Owners and Their Response to COVID-19 Policies in a Comparative Perspective,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 48:e12297.

Michael Hansen and Agustín Goenaga. (2024). “Gender, Political Resources, and Expressions of Democratic Evaluations,” Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, Vol. 45 (2), pp. 230-243.

Goenaga, Agustín, Oriol Sabaté and Jan Teorell. Forthcoming. “The State Does Not Live by Warfare Alone: War and Revenue in the Long Nineteenth Century in Europe and the Americas”, Review of International Organizations, 18, pp.393-418 .

Goenaga, Agustín and Michael Hansen. 2022. “Guy-Guessing Democracy: Gender and Item Non-Response Bias in Evaluations of Democratic Institutions,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, 43 (4), pp. 499-513.

Goenaga, Agustín. (2022). “Who Cares about the Public Sphere”, European Journal of Political Research, 61(1), pp. 230-254.