I am currently an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading, the Co-Director of the Public Opinion Analytics Lab , and the Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded project: DIVIDED: Inequality & Polarization Prevention. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (Data Science Institute).
Previously, I held Assistant Professorship positions at Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Kent and Swansea University. I worked as a Political Data Scientist at UK Labour Party HQ and advised the Data, Strategy and Elections teams as part of their 2024 General Election campaign. I completed my postdoc at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I hold a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin. I have held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford (DPIR) and at the European University Institute (Robert Schuman Centre).
I specialise in democratic resilience and innovation, electoral behaviour and public opinion analysis, persuasion and campaign strategy with a focus on European (incl. British) and European Union politics. I am a computational social scientist, and I leverage machine learning (predictive modelling, large language models for quantitative text analysis) and experiments (survey/lab) in my research.
My research focuses on democratic resilience: it investigates key contemporary democratic challenges such as political polarization, populism, representation failures, information manipulation, inequalities (economic, social, political), and democracy's expansion to the supranational realm. My research has four main areas of application:
I have led academic research projects on vote choice in European elections, including on the Brexit referendum, particularly focusing on motivated reasoning and retrospective voting processes. As part of this line of research, I have also examined attitudes on economic, climate, immigration, EU integration (euroscepticism) policies, as well as attitudes on democracy and towards institutional processes. I have expertise with major comparative post-election and public opinion studies such as the European Election Studies (EES), the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the British Election Study (BES), and the Eurobarometer. I have furthermore worked on several applied policy projects on public opinion tracking and measurement for UK Labour's GE24 campaign. I am currently working on a SAGE manual on public opinion analytics, and I am a member of the EES Executive Board and co-directing the Public Opinion Analytics Lab, a multi-University hub for advancements in survey and public opinion polling research and methodology. I am furthermore leading on survey gamification through my UKRI FLF grant.
Selected Publications
I have led academic research projects measuring representation failure, democratic and/or populist attitudes, as well as process (institutional) preferences, including in relation to supranational political systems. Some of my projects have investigated the conditions under which politicians respond to public attitudes, as well as the consequences of representation failures for legitimacy and democratic norms. I have worked on democracy's boundary problem, and how democracy is adapting to supranational expansion, exploring, in particular, the extent of, and potential solutions to, the EU's democratic deficit. My UKRI FLF grant will focus on the democratic challenges posed by economic and social inequalities, and will have a work-package on deliberative democracy innovations.
Selected Publications
My academic projects on this topic investigate the role of social networks, of sender and of message characteristics for successful persuasion and attitude change. In my applied work for the UK Labour Party HQ, I led the quantitative message testing research programme for the Strategy and Elections teams. Several work-packages from my UKRI FLF grant examine the role of social context in moderating or accentuating partisan messaging. I am currently also leading an academic programme of research on micro- and nano-targeting.
Several of my research projects have direct implications for institutional and policy reform. My research has, in particular, examined the support for, and potential democratic gains of, lifting territorial vetoes and intergovernmental decision-making rules in the EU. Various projects showcase how conjoint analysis can support policy design (particularly on climate policy).
Selected Publications
Listed below are the university courses I have taught so far, with links to course materials for the courses I delivered as a sole convener: