I am currently an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading and PI of the UKRI-funded project: DIVIDED: Inequality & Polarization Prevention. I am a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (Data Science Institute) and currently a visiting fellow at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre.
Previously, I was an LSE Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and held Assistant Professorship positions at Swansea University, at the University of Kent and at Royal Holloway, University of London. 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 hold a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin, and I am a HEA Fellow.
I specialise in electoral behaviour and public opinion analysis, with a focus on European (incl. British) and European Union politics. I am a quantitative computational social scientist, and I leverage predictive modelling, machine learning, and large language models in my research.
My research blends political science and social psychology and it focuses on investigating factors conducive to democratic control, conceptualised as both accountability and political representation. The central aim of my research is to investigate factors that strengthen representative democracy - both at the domestic and supranational levels. I aim to investigate interventions that (a) enhance political information processing and accountability-inducing behaviours; (b) enhance the representation of citizens' preferences in policy-making.
I am working on 4 main research areas:
My projects on this topic investigate heuristics and biases in voters, retrospective voting, and the conditions under which voters can hold political agents to account. My published and working papers on this area also explore the causes and consequences of motivated reasoning and selective exposure and processing of information, borrowing from social and cognitive psychology. I am currently PI on a multi-year UKRI-funded project (DIVIDED) on political polarization and economic inequality that focuses on the cognitive microfoundations of the inequality-polarization link.
Publications
My projects on this topic investigate the role of messages and information in attitude change, and the moderating role of social networks, sender and message characteristics for successful persuasion. In my work for the UK Labour Party HQ, I led the quantitative message testing research programme for the Strategy and Elections teams.
Publications
My projects on this topic investigate the link between legislative activity and/or policy and public opinion and the conditions under which politicians respond to public attitudes. My published and working papers on this area also explore the consequences of representation failures for legitimacy and democratic norms.
Publications
The European Union is now closer to a political system than to traditional IOs. My published and working papers evaluate whether EU's decision making and legislative activities conform to expectations from advanced democracies. This line of my research also looks into attitudes towards supranational politics in European public opinion.
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: