Meet the team
Members of the research team
Professor Susan Banducci, University of Birmingham, UK
Principal Investigator.
Susan Banducci is a 125th Anniversary Chair at the University of Birmingham, the founding former Director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. Susan’s research interests are in the areas of comparative political behaviour, media, and political communication.
Dr Alona Dolinsky, University of Birmingham, UK
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Alona’s research focuses on political parties, group appeals, political representation and election communication using computational text analysis and survey methods. Alona was previously been based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow where she worked on a new, large-scale database of group appeals across Europe.
Dr Jess Fagin, University of Birmingham, UK
Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Jess Fagin is social anthropologist who completed her PhD in Anthropology at The University of Exeter and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include critical race studies and ethnography with a focus on the intersections of whiteness, gender, social class and anti-Muslim racism in Britain.
Dr Hyerin Seo, University of Birmingham, UK
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Hyerin Seo’s research is based on how the public perceive their national identity in relation to other nations and their own social identities such as gender, age, and party affiliation, and how that interaction leads to influence political behaviour. Hyerin’s methodological interests include web scraping and text analysis to understand the public opinions of identity discourses.
Julia van Zijl (PhD Researcher), University of Birmingham, UK
PhD Researcher
Julia van Zijl’s current research focuses on women during electoral campaigns. Her research areas are in political participation, gender and politics, comparative politics, postcolonialism, and social movements. Julia also lectures at Maastricht University.
Project partners
Dr Joshua Blamire, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Joshua Blamire is based at the Institute for Community Research and Development (ICRD) at the University of Wolverhampton.
Joshua’s research explores how communities in different places respond to social and political processes and transformation (such as austerity, Brexit and COVID-19) with a focus on identity, inequality, and place-based politics and drawing upon ethnographic methodologies and community research.
Professor Ali Çarkoğlu, Koç University, Turkey
Ali Çarkoğlu is currently a professor of political science at Koç University. He received his Ph.D. at the State University of New York-Binghamton in 1994. He previously taught at Boğaziçi and Sabancı universities in Istanbul. He was a resident fellow in 2008-2009 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). His areas of research interest include voting behaviour, elections, public opinion and party politics in Turkey. He is the founding director of the Center for Survey Research at Koç University.
Dr Sofia Collignon, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Sofia Collignon is a is Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Sofia's main research interests include a) the study of candidates, elections, and parties in general; b) harassment and intimidation of political elites, and c) violence against women in politics.
Dr Marta Fraile, Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP), The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain
Marta Fraile is a political scientist and Research Professor (CSIC). Her research spans across the fields of public opinion, media effects, political participation, and gender and politics.
Dr Esra Işsever Ekinci, Bilkent University, Turkey
Esra İşsever Ekinci is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University. Her research examines the causes of electoral reform and its consequences for legislative behaviour in parliamentary democracies. She also investigates political representation with a focus on candidate selection, political parties, and the representation of women.
Dr Alejandro Tirado Castro, Institute for Public Goods and Policies (IPP), The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain.
Alejandro Tirado Castro is currently a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Public Goods and Policies (CSIC). Alejandro’s main research interests are political socialisation, gender and political inequality, responsiveness, support for democracy, and polarisation.
Professor Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter, UK
Katharine Tyler is a Professor (Anthropology). Katharine’s research falls within the interdisciplinary area of critical race and ethnicity studies, with a particular focus on the formation of white racial identities, social class, postcolonialism and Britishness.
Dr Daphne van der Pas, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Daphne van der Pas is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her research focuses on the interaction between media and politics, political underrepresentation, political leadership, and gender in politics.
Previous members of the team
Dr Liz Ablett
Liz worked as Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project.
Liz is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Newcastle University and co-organiser of the Institutional Ethnography Network.
Dr Aditi Dutta
Aditi worked as Research Assistant on the project
Aditi is a computational social science researcher with expertise in natural language processing, data science, and the study of social and political behaviour online. Aditi is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change
Dr Kaitlin Senk
Kaitlin worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the project
Kaitlin Senk is now a Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at University of Bath. Kaitlin’s research investigates women's representation globally. Specifically, she focuses on women's presence in legislatures, how institutions condition women's representation, the policies women work on, and how voters respond to women's representation.
Community researchers
We would like to the thank the team of community researchers who supported the ethnographic fieldwork.
Spain: Lidia Núñez, Raúl Villegas, Berta Caihuelas Navajas
Netherlands: Julia van Neerrijnen, Siënna Hernandez, Jamie Janssen, Tara Scheer
Turkey: Efsa Demirhan, İlkim Kayaş
Here, some of the community researchers share their insights and experiences of working on the project:
I am a third-year student studying psychology and sociology at University College Maastricht. Participating in the TWICEASGOOD project as a community researcher has been a valuable experience for me. During the project, I had the opportunity to spend time in the field with researchers. Here, I shadowed and talked to female-presenting candidates for the provincial elections in Limburg during campaign time. I am thankful for having learned more about this highly relevant topic and having been able to contribute a bit to expanding the current knowledge base on it.
