Members
Prof Joost van Spanje
Joost is professor of political science and principal investigator on #NewNews. He has published around 50 journal articles and two books. Joost specialises in comparative politics, political communication, political behaviour, and public opinion. Joost has been awarded several grants, adding up to more than €3,000,000 of individual research funding. In addition, his students nominated him for the 2017 and the 2020 University of Amsterdam Lecturer of the Year Awards. Joost's media experience includes TV interviews on Al Jazeera and France 24 as well as national news media in Europe, North America, Australia, and South America. He is on Twitter, see @joostvanspanje.
Dr Stuart Bramwell
Stuart is a fulltime postdoctoral researcher on #NewNews. His research interests include elite-level politics, social identity in politics, democratization, and authoritarian politics. He is the co-creator of WhoGov which is the largest publicly available dataset on the political elite. Stuart has published two articles in the American Political Science Review, one in 2020 and one that is open access, downloadable using FirstView from the American Political Science Review website. Stuart holds a DPhil in Politics from Oxford University. You can find him on Twitter via @stuart_bramwell .
Dr Costin Ciobanu
Costin is a fulltime postdoctoral researcher on #NewNews. His work lies at the intersection of comparative politics, political behavior, and international political economy. He is particularly interested in how different types of labor market shocks (e.g., bankruptcy, offshoring, automation) are politicized and publicized to influence political attitudes and voting behavior, predominantly in Europe. Costin’s work has been published in, among other journals, The Journal of Politics and the European Journal of Political Research. He holds a PhD in Political Science from McGill University and an MA in Political Communication from University Paris 1 Panthéon - Sorbonne. Twitter: @CostinMCiobanu.
Dr Krisztina Szabo
Krisztina is a fulltime postdoctoral researcher on #NewNews, and a visiting lecturer at Central European University (CEU). She holds a PhD in Political Science from CEU and a PhD in Economics from Corvinus University. Krisztina studies the interaction of political and economic systems in developing countries and in Central and Eastern Europe. She has focused on studying voters' behaviour, public opinion and policy preferences as well as the electoral effect of various public policies. Krisztina is particularly interested in political methodology, quantitative methods, and (causal) inference in the social sciences. Her work has been published in The Journal of Development Studies and in Political Studies Review.
Dr Miku Matsunaga
Miku is a fulltime postdoctoral researcher on #NewNews. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political behaviour and political violence in representative democracies. She is also interested in political economy and defence policy. Her recent projects study the (violent) causes and consequences of (populist) radical right parties. Her papers have been published in Comparative Political Studies and Party Politics. After having completed an LL.B., she earned an MPP degree (Tokyo), an MA degree in Politics (NYU), and a Ph.D. degree in Government (Essex). Before joining #NewNews, she was a research fellow at Department of Economics, University of Tokyo.
Dr Rachid Azrout
Rachid is assistant professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam, working on the #NewNews project for one day a week. His research examines how EU citizens form opinions toward European Union enlargement and the role of the media in this process. His research interests also include immigration, electoral behaviour, political parties and polarization, combined with communication science, such as the influence of individual exposure to media content on opinion formation. Rachid’s work has been published in, among other journals, the European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior, the Journal of Communication, and Public Opinion Quarterly.
Marta Fatica
Marta is a fulltime PhD student on #NewsNews, having previously worked as a research assistant on the project. Prior to starting her PhD, Marta obtained an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Marta’s current research interests lie within the intersection of gender, political leadership, media, and voter perception in Europe. You can find Marta on Twitter: @marta_fatica.
Greta Sanna
Greta is a research assistant on #NewNews. An aspiring academic from Italy, she holds an MSc in Social and Cultural Psychology from London School of Economics, with a focus on Political Psychology. During her time at LSE, Greta developed an interest in the factors explaining the success of populist radical right parties and the challenges they pose for European democracies. In addition to #NewNews, she is also a research assistant at the Institute for Public Safety, Crime and Justice at the University of Northampton where she works on a range of projects including the evaluation of community sentence treatments.
Dr Alessio Scopelliti
Alessio is a research assistant on #NewNews. He holds a PhD degree in Politics from the University of Bristol as well as two Master’s degrees in European Studies, both with distinction (Universita degli Studi di Padova and Jagiellonian University). His research interests include cleavage studies, comparative politics, European Union, Euroscepticism, nationalism, party systems, political ideology, political parties, political theory, populism, and quantitative analysis. His Twitter handle is @AlessioScopell5.
Nicole Young
Nicole combines two functions on #NewNews: she is a project support officer and a research assistant. Taken together, she works on the ERC Consolidator Grant project for two days a week.