Projects
POLPOP
I am currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded POLPOP project (PI Stefaan Walgrave) that researches how politicians evaluate public opinion. In 2025 I will be leading the team (alongside Will Jennings & Phil Cowley) collecting data from the UK for the first time.
I mainly work on papers relating to politicians' evaluation of public opinion. This is based on qualitative analysis of politicians' responses to open questions about the signals of public opinion that they most value and that they are most likely to dismiss. Along with Bart Maes, I am working on a scoreboard of the criteria that politicians generally use to evaluate the utility of public opinion signals. Future papers will analyse how politicians' backgrounds correlate with the tendency to prioritise particular criteria, and on the differences in evaluation of signals between politicians in majoritarian and consensual democracies.
Politicians' understanding of, and responses to, low levels of political trust
I recently completed a project with Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker on senior UK political elites' awareness of political trust and perceptions of what could be done to tackle political trust. You can read our conclusions here. The next round of POLPOP will run questions that will allow us to test our initial findings in a comparative context.
Candidate selection in the UK
Rob Ford, Marta Miori (University of Manchester) and I have built a database of shortlisted candidates for winnable Parliamentary constituencies at the 2019 and 2024 UK general election to understand who gets shortlisted for winnable constituencies and who wins contested selections. You can access our replication files here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/J6UKGO
Political parties' use of public opinion research
I have a long-standing interest in how political parties use public opinion research to inform their positioning. I am currently preparing a bid with Karolin Soontjens to explore parties' use of polling in a comparative context.
In 2022 I co-chaired an ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on this subject with Professor Tinette Schnatterer (SciencesPo Bordeaux).
