Projects
POLPOP II
I am currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded POLPOP II project (PI Stefaan Walgrave) that looks at how politicians evaluate public opinion. The project has surveyed politicians in 14 different countries and we are now analysing the data.
I am particularly interested in understanding more about how politicians' backgrounds affects which signals of public opinion they respond to, why they take certain signals as better indicators of public opinion than others, and how their perceptions of these signals about public opinion affect their actions and decisions.
TrustGov
Since late 2021, I have been working with the TrustGov team based at the University of Southampton (Professors Will Jennings & Gerry Stoker, and Dr. Jennifer Gaskell). The ESRC funded TrustGov project seeks to understand what drives political trust or distrust around the world and what can be done to improve levels of trust.
I have been working on an aspect of the project where we have been interviewing UK political elites to find out more about their perceptions of the concept, and levels of political trust.
You can find out more about the TrustGov project at trustgov.net.
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 UK general election. We are currently analysing who gets shortlisted for winnable constituencies and who wins contested selections to understand the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, local links and party insider status on candidate selection.
UK political parties' use of public opinion research
I am currently working on a preliminary project to explore how UK political parties use public opinion research, be that quantitative opinion polling or more qualitative studies.
In 2022 I co-chaired an ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on this subject with Professor Tinette Schnatterer (SciencesPo Bordeaux).
