Dr José Tomás Labarca
- Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow
Contact
Connect
Location
- Department of Politics and International Studies
- The Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
About
José Tomás Labarca is an Isaac Newton Trust Academic Career Development Fellow at POLIS and St Edmund's College. Before coming to Cambridge, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of European and International Studies, King's College London, working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project “The Political Economy of Growth Models in an Age of Stagnation”.
Jose Tomas' academic background is interdisciplinary, combining degrees in History and Sociology. He received his PhD in Sociology from The University of Edinburgh. In 2023, his PhD was awarded with the Political Studies Association’s Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.
His current research agenda looks at the state, government elites, expert knowledge, and economic policymaking. His book, Fragmented Policy Change (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) reconstructs pivotal transformations in British budget politics and macroeconomic institutions in the 1960s-1980s and offers counter-intuitive insights that complicate existing models of broad-ranging political-economy changes, neoliberalism, and austerity politics.
Research
Research interests
- Political economy
- Twentieth-century British history and politics
- Historical sociology
- Economic sociology
- Political sociology
- Economic policymaking
- Macroeconomic policymaking
- Government elites
- Expert knowledge
- The modern state
Key publications
- Labarca, J.T. (Forthcoming). Fragmented Policy Change: Fiscal and Bureaucratic Politics in 1960s-1980s United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press.
- Labarca, J.T., & Rademacher, I. (2026). "The Only Game in Town: Central Bank Politicisation Management and Macroeconomic Policy Discourse at the Zero-Lower-Bound". New Political Economy, pp. 1-24.
- Labarca J.T. (2025). "Towards a (Minority) Shareholder State? The Labour Government's Fiscal Framework". The Political Quarterly, 96 (2), pp. 305-313.
- Labarca, J.T. (2025). "Unintended Institutionalization: How the Politics of Symbolic Fiscal Practices Shapes Economic Policy". Socio-Economic Review, 23 (1), pp. 365-392.
- Biehl, A., Labarca, J.T., & Atria, J. (2025). "Class-Based Taxation: The Fiscal Paternalism of the Chilean Income Tax?". Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 43 (2), pp. 191-216.
- Atria, J., Biehl, A., & Labarca, J.T. (2019). "Towards a Fiscal Sociology of Latin America". ERLACS – European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, No. 107, pp. 139-150.
- Biehl, A., Labarca, J.T., & Vela, J. (2019). "Taxes Without Taxpayers: The Invisibility of Taxes in Chile". Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Vol. 64: No. 236, pp. 49-82.
- Labarca, J.T. (2017)."'For Those Who Want a Government of Popular Avant-Garde". New Political Practices in the Presidential Campaign of the Chilean Christian Democracy, 1962-1964’. Latin American Research Review, Vol.52: No.1, 50-63. (In Spanish).
- Labarca, J.T. (2016)."Cooperatives as Public Policy: Rural Electrification in Chile, 1940-1970". European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, No. 102, 27-46. (In Spanish).
- Labarca, J.T. (2016)."The 'Short Cycle' of the Chilean Student Movement: Sectoral Conflict or Systemic Questioning?". Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Vol.78, No. 4, 605-632. DOI (In Spanish).
- Labarca, J.T. (2016). "Cooperatives and the Subsidiary State in Post-Dictatorship Chile, 1990-2015". Revista Idelcoop, No. 218, 135-153. (In Spanish).