Alexandra Scacco

Prof. Alexandra Scacco is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Hamburg and Vice Director of the Institutions and Political Inequality unit at the WZB Social Science Research Center in Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and previously served as an Assistant Professor at New York University. Her research examines individual decision-making under extreme risk, such as participation in communal violence, irregular migration, and intergroup trust in conflict zones. She employs observational and experimental methods in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, with a focus on improving field-based measurement and knowledge aggregation in social science.

Scacco's methodological contributions include pioneering work on digit-based fraud detection and addressing aggregation challenges in development research. Her book Anatomy of a Riot (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) analyzes the drivers of ethnic violence in Nigeria. She has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda, and leads ongoing projects in Israel and Lebanon.

Her research outputs span political violence, migration, prejudice reduction, and pandemic impacts in low-resource settings. Current projects include intergroup contact interventions, digital inequality in Kenya, and modeling pandemic outcomes. She has collaborated with institutions like the World Bank and global research teams through platforms like PLOS Medicine and Nature.