Work in Progress

Current projects with grants

I currently hold three grants:

  • Australian Research Council: “Government Popularity, Political Responsiveness and Democracy in Australia” ($476,138, with Prof Ian McAllister, ANU)
  • Australian Research Council: “Place, Identity, and Localism in Populist Politics” ($312,265, with Assoc Prof Benjamin Moffitt, Dr Rachel Busbridge, Dr Mark Chou, all ACU, and Prof Simon Tormey, Deakin).
  • I am part of the Australian team within the “POLPOP How Politicians Evaluate Public Opinion” project, financed by an Advanced ERC grant.

Research on public attitudes and expectations towards parties and democracy

Several of my projects are concerned with the way people think about democracy and political parties. While we know that many citizens in Western democracy are not very satisfied, we have relatively little knowledge about their specific expectations and whether they are indeed willing to trade democracy for a non-democratic alternative. To shed light on this, I work on the following projects:

  • how citizens conceptualise and evaluate the importance of democratic dimensions; developing innovative survey items; with Andrej Zaslove
  • which expectations citizens have towards intra-party democracy, including how parties organise, recruit their members, and communicate; with unique surveys in Australia and the UK; with Declan Thomas
  • whether citizens want a dictator when they show a preference for an undemocratic strong leader; with a conjoint experiment in Australia and the UK; with Feodor Snagovski

Populism and Democracy

The role of populist parties in democratic countries has been a hot topic for a few years now. Despite ample research on most aspects of this phenomenon — its causes, variants, and consequences — there is still a lot we don’t know. Currently, I work on three projects in this area:

  • do populist and non-populist parties show different patterns in adapting their ideological core and periphery policy positions; with Fabian Habersack
  • whether populist and non-populist MPs have different views on democracy and how citizens perceive democracy; this is part of the POLPOP project
  • how populist parties use local identities to make their claims and local civil societies combat populist tendencies; this is the core of my second ARC project

Young people and democracy

While some research indicates that young people might be less democratic or more apathetic towards democracy, there is still a lot to do to understand how young people relate to the body politics. Within this area, I mainly work on a multi-country project led by Duncan McDonnell (Griffith University) that has run a common survey within party youth organisations in 6 countries. Papers stemming from this project investigate different explanations for joining party youth wings, for different levels of youth wing activities, as well as the gendered dimension of political ambition among youth wing members.