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 British and European (incl. European Union) politics. I leverage experimental methods (survey/lab) and machine learning,such as predictive modelling and computational text-as-data methods (incl. LLM approaches) in my research.
My research focuses on democratic resilience: it investigates key contemporary democratic challenges such as political polarization, populism, representation failures, information manipulation, AI, inequalities (economic, social, political), and democracy's expansion to the supranational realm.
I have led several research programmes on policy responsiveness, representation failures, and electoral behaviour, each involving extensive public‑opinion measurement and survey‑analytic work. Across this agenda, I have examined citizen's attitudes on economic, climate, immigration, and EU‑integration policies, as well as attitudes toward democracy, populism, and institutional processes, across several European countries. My work draws heavily on major comparative survey infrastructures, including the European Election Studies (EES), the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), the British Election Study (BES), and the Eurobarometer. Alongside my academic research, I have contributed to applied public‑opinion work, including poll‑tracking and attitudinal‑measurement projects for UK Labour’s GE24 campaign. I have been recently awarded a SAGE textbook contract on the topic of public opinion analytics. I serve on the Executive Board of the European Election Study and co‑direct the Public Opinion Analytics Lab, a multi‑university hub for advancing survey methodology and public‑opinion research. Through my UKRI FLF grant, I am also leading an innovative agenda on survey gamification.
Selected Publications
My research examines a range of institutional pressures—including those emerging from international and supranational governance—on democratic resilience. A consistent finding is that institutional design plays a decisive role: empowering institutions of pluralistic representation significantly improves the responsiveness of public policies, bolsters the legitimacy of global governance, and can even mitigate populist pressures. I show that electoral rules that promote intra‑party competition facilitate more accurate retrospective voting and, in turn, improve democratic accountability, whereas the use of referendums tends to weaken accountability processes. My research has also contributed extensively to debates on democracy's boundary problem, analysing how democratic systems can adapt to supranational integration. This includes detailed assessment of the EU’s democratic deficit, its sources, and the institutional reforms that could mitigate it. Several of my projects have direct implications for institutional and policy design. For example, I have shown how relaxing territorial vetoes and reducing intergovernmental constraints is associated with gains in democratic responsiveness. This strand of work also demonstrates the value of conjoint analysis for evidence-based institutional design and evaluation.
Selected Publications
My research examines not only elite and policy responsiveness but also the reciprocal dimension of representation: elite‑to‑public political communication and persuasion. My academic work in this area investigates persuasive effects and, in particular, the interaction between message and receiver/context characteristics. Several strands of my current UKRI FLF grant assess how social context conditions the effectiveness of partisan messaging, either amplifying or dampening persuasive cues. My research in this area chiefly evaluates micro‑targeting strategies and their implications for persuasion, mobilization, and demobilisation campaign strategies. In my applied work for UK Labour Party HQ, I led the quantitative message‑testing programme for the Strategy and Elections teams. I then have led a team that developed a novel micro‑targeting methodology — *nano‑targeting* — to assess the capacity of machine‑learning models to refine political communication strategies. My current research investigates how AI‑driven communication systems, and the algorithmic biases embedded within them, may reshape democratic processes and undermine voters’ ability to hold representatives to account.
Selected Publications
This research strand examines how socio‑economic inequalities, spatial disconnect, and the structure of citizens’ social networks shape democratic resilience. Building on the broader UKRI FLF DIVIDED project agenda, it investigates how one's immediate socio-economic context contribute to political disaffection, polarisation, and declining trust in representative institutions. This work will analyse the mechanisms through which economic and social inequality weaken citizens’ sense of political efficacy and representation, and will include a dedicated work‑package on democratic innovations in deliberation. This component evaluates whether new deliberative designs — particularly those that bridge socio‑economic divides and strengthen cross‑cutting network ties — can bolster democratic responsiveness and support more resilient democratic outcomes.
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: