About Me
I am a Professor of Political Science at University College London. I am serving as Head of Department from October 2021 through August 2025.
From September 2025 through August 2030, I will be the primary investigator for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP). The initial stage of the project will seek to improve how political science measures which problems citizens think are most severe and most in need of their governments’ attention. The resulting advances in measurement will enable later stages of the project which will focus on improving our scientific understanding of where these attitudes come from and how they shape citizens’ views of media and politicians. One important application of this work will be characterising how (and which) voters prioritise international problems versus national problems, and the implications of this for how national political leaders engage internationally on questions of climate change, security, migration, and trade.
Recently, my research has focused on developing new designs for highly multidimensional survey experiments that enable us to better measure key concepts relevant to public opinion and political behaviour. This has included projects introducing new methods for measuring the relative importance of different issues to voters; the extent to which there are robust patterns in which kinds of political arguments are persuasive; public preferences over the composition of government spending; public attitudes towards alternative ways that governments raise tax revenues; the extent to which political disagreement can be ascribed to moral disagreement; and the relative perceived severity, and priority for government action, of different politically salient problems. In addition, I am working on a textbook on social science measurement, a book on the structure of public opinion and voter behaviour, and a project examining public attitudes to democracy in the UK.
Earlier in my career, my research was focused on the development of new methods for the measurement of political preferences from large observational survey, voting, network and text datasets. This work included applications to citizens, legislators and judges across the US, UK, EU and beyond.
I worked as a Senior Data Science Advisor to YouGov from 2016-2021 and was an Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review from 2016-2020. Before joining UCL, I worked at the London School of Economics as a Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Professor from 2011 to 2018.
Contact
- b.lauderdale@ucl.ac.uk
- @benlauderdale.bsky.social
- @mastodon.online@benlauderdale
- Department of Political Science
University College London
Room 1.06, 29-30 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9QU
United Kingdom
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