Elizabeth G. Pfeffer (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Dartmouth College in the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, where she also manages the Class of 1964 Policy Research Shop. Her research examines the interaction between welfare state institutions and the criminal legal system.
Pfeffer’s 2023 dissertation, completed at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations, explores how citizens and policymakers balance trade-offs between punishment, rehabilitation, and social welfare, and how these priorities influence variations in state punitiveness across different countries and over time. Her broader research interests include access to justice, comparative political economy, inequality, race and ethnicity, and state capacity.