About me
I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London.
You can call me Chris.
Research
Most of my research relates to elections and public opinion in one way or another.
I am currently the co-director of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded British Election Study – a survey research project that has been running in one form or another since the mid-1960s – on which I have worked since 2015. We track public opinion and voting behaviour in British elections and try to explain changes in party support and electoral alignments. In 2023 we were awarded the inaugural Pippa Norris Prize from the Political Studies Association for a research team that has made an outstanding contribution to advancing knowledge in political studies.
I also work on another ESRC funded project – Democracy and Social Change in Britain, 1851-2024 – which combines historical election results and redistricted census data to look at the relationship between social change and elections in Britain over the long term.
As well as these two ESRC funded projects, I also work on a variety of things to do with polling and survey research, electoral registration and voter ID, political psychology, and quantitative methods. I used to work on the comparative electoral politics of European integration, which was the subject of my graduate research.
You can read more about my research projects here, and see a full list of my publications here.
Career
I have worked at Royal Holloway since 2020. Before that I worked at the University of Manchester, where I was a post-doctoral researcher working on the British Election Study (2015-18), and then a Presidential Fellow (2018-20). I was also a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (2015-19). During my graduate studies I was a College Lecturer in politics at Christ Church, Oxford (2012-13).
At Royal Holloway I teach two graduate modules about political psychology and quantitative research methods, and an undergraduate module about democracy in Britain. I have previously taught a wide variety of other modules relating to comparative politics, political sociology, and the politics of the EU.
I have supervised undergraduate, masters, and PhD dissertations on a wide variety of topics. In 2020 I was awarded a University of Manchester Faculty of Humanities Outstanding Staff Award for post-graduate taught dissertation supervision.
You can read more about my current teaching here and see my CV for information about my career.
Education
As an undergraduate I did a double degree (BA/BPsych) at the Australian National University, majoring in Politics, Philosophy, and Psychology. I moved to the University of Oxford for my graduate studies, where I completed my MPhil in 2011 and my DPhil (PhD) in 2015.
Other work
Since 2015 I have worked as a data analyst for the ITV News overnight election results programme. Since the 2016 EU referendum I have run ITV’s result projection models, and since 2019 I have been part of the team that produces the joint ITV-BBC-Sky exit poll. You can read more about that here.
I also sit on the Editorial Board of Electoral Studies.
You can read more about other things I do here.
