Professor Susan Banducci

1989 – 1995    PhD, Political Science. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

1988 – 1989    MA, Political Science. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

1984 – 1988    BSc, Political Science. Santa Clara University, CA, USA

Susan completed her PhD at the University of California (Santa Barbara) before undertaking postdoctoral research with the New Zealand Election Study (Waikato University) and the European Election Study (ASCoR, University of Amsterdam). She was Professor of Politics at the University of Exeter from 2006 to 2024. Susan was the founding director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre, creating an interdisciplinary centre devoted to improving undergraduate provision of quantitative methods training. She was also a deputy director of the University of Exeter’s Institute for Data Science and AI (2018-2021).

Since 2010, Susan has participated in and led large international, interdisciplinary projects (five where she is/was PI) worth over €10 million in funding, leading to significant research outputs including research platforms for community building and large cross-national data sets. She has led or been a co-investigator on six UKRI/ESRC and five European-funded projects. Currently, Susan is leading TWICEASGOOD (an ERC Advanced Grant), which draws on ethnographic and computational methods to explore women’s experiences of sexism in election campaigns both offline and online.

Elections, media and political communication including the uses of social media and new forms of data. Current students are working on elections and representation, gender and online sexism.

Susan’s current research agenda addresses how technology and political institutions interact to disrupt democratic processes. This activity draws on her current ERC project and longstanding collaborations with data scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Broadly, Susan is interested in how technologies ‘happen to us’—especially the social, cultural, and institutional dynamics that shape their impact on democracy. In her ERC project, for example, she examines the day-to-day experiences of women candidates during election campaigns, drawing on ethnographic methods. The research team is uncovering their relationship to digital technology as a campaign tool and the impact these relationships have on the representation of women in politics. This research addresses how technological change is gendered.

Susan is also engaged in research on politics and the news and information ecosystem. This research focuses on the impact of the digital environment on news and information use and its political consequences, contributing to the debate on misinformation (Horvath et al. 2024) and how the changing shape of the information ecosystem (including ownership structures and funding sources), trust, and altered news habits can shape citizen engagement. Project outputs from ESRC-funded projects have shown the privileged position of traditional media even in online spaces. Communities of news sharers do develop on social media platforms, but these are not always defined by ideological content, and traditional media can still play a role in setting the news agenda during election campaigns. Methodologically, this work has been careful to identify strengths and weaknesses of computational approaches. Susan has set out some of these parameters in a book chapter on using digital trace data to measure news exposure (Banducci et al. 2022).

A third area of Susan’s research, citisen responses to new technologies, addresses the consequences of new technologies for democratic legitimacy and how trust shapes patterns of use. For example, trust in providers of the technology can override any privacy concerns and lead to continued use (Horvath et al. 2021). Recent work on digital democratic innovations shows that they can be useful where trusted information is scarce, such as in authoritarian regimes, for those in the centre of the political spectrum (Simge et al. 2023). Susan is also collaborating with bio-scientists, STS, and legal scholars on a study of ‘publics and phage therapy.’ Phage therapy is a novel, individualised treatment for bacterial infections. Initial development work and pilot surveys, the result of collaboration with a cell biologist, have begun to map opinions of the public and health professionals, affect, and the role of regulation.