Milena Petrovic

My name is Milena Petrovic, and I study the comparative politics of economic policymaking in advanced industrial democracies.

I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at Tulane University and a Dissertation Fellow at the Murphy Institute’s Center for Public Policy Research. During the 2025–26 academic year, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at Brown University’s Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance.

My work is driven by questions concerning the state’s role in economic transformation, the influence of technocratic elites in distributional politics, and sources of institutional variation across substantially similar states. My dissertation develops a theory of Bureaucratic Ideational Statecraft to explain when and how mid-level government officials drive major reforms in macroeconomic governance across advanced democracies. It draws on elite interviews, archival research and text-as-data methods and has included fieldwork in Germany, New Zealand and Ireland.

This work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, a DAAD Research Grant, an APSA Centennial Center Research Grant, the Paul and Elizabeth Selley Dissertation Fellowship, and my current fellowship at the Murphy Institute.

My research interests stem from my prior experience as a policy advisor in the New Zealand government, where I became interested in how officials’ advice shapes national economic trajectories. Before beginning my PhD, I worked at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, where I advised on labor market policy and pay equity reform. I received an MPhil in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Victoria University of Wellington, and a BA with First Class Honours from the University of Canterbury.