Autonomous University of Barcelona

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is a Catalan public university founded in 1968 on four principles of autonomy: freedom to select teaching staff, admission available to all students (but with a limited number), freedom to create its own study plans and freedom to administrate the University’s capital. Nowadays, it consists of 57 departments in the experimental, life, social and human sciences, spread among 13 faculties/schools. All these centers together award a total of 85 qualifications in the form of first degrees, diplomas, and engineering degrees. Moreover, almost 80 doctoral programs, and more than 80 other postgraduate programs are offered. UAB has more than 40,000 students and more than 3,600 academic and research staff. The UAB is a pioneering institution in terms of fostering research and it is considered to be the best University in Spain by the 2012 QS World University Rankings.

The group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship, the Spanish partner of the project, is a young research group specialized in the analysis of citizens’ political attitudes and behaviour. It is linked to the Department of Political Science and Public Law and to the Institut de Govern i Polítiques Publiques (IGOP), an interdisciplinary research institute that hosts this project. IGOP draws together political scientists and sociologists, but also researchers coming from other disciplines within social sciences, such us geographers, economists, anthropologists, jurists and environmentalists. IGOP has a remarkable record in projects of basic and applied research on government and public policies. IGOP’s main aims are to be a place for the production and the exchange of knowledge, committed to rigour and scientific excellence, and also a place for mutual learning and intervening in social transformation processes, together with social agents working on the ground. Further information about IGOP can be found at http://igop.uab.cat/

Members of the Spanish team

Dr Eva Anduiza is the principal investigator for the Spanish team. She holds a degree in political science and sociology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a postgraduate diploma on social science data analysis from the University of Essex, and a Ph.D. in political and social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the UAB since 2003 and principal investigator of the research group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship, whose main goal is the analysis of citizens’ political involvement and political attitudes. She has participated in several European projects such CIVICACTIVE and HUM-VIB (on the comparative analysis of electoral turnout), LOCALMULTIDEM (on the comparative analysis of the political incorporation of migrants in different European cities), and CCC (on the comparative analysis of political protest). She has recently published on voter turnout ( here and here), migrants’ political attitudes, online political participation, digital media influence in political engagement , political protest and political knowledge in Spain, and partisan bias in attitudes towards corruption.

For more information visit: http://democracia.uab.cat/index.php/ca/component/contact/12-contacts/2-eva-anduiza

Camilo Cristancho is currently finishing his PhD in Political Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests are in political attitudes and behavior and in particular on protest politics. His work deals primarily with quantitative research and statistical analysis of cross-national and protest surveys and non-reactive data from social media and digital traces. He is member of the research group Democracy, Elections and Citizenship and is currently involved on a project that studies attitudes toward the legitimacy of protest on Twitter for the Catalan Government. He was part of the Spanish team in the collaborative research project “Caught in the act of protest: Contextualizing contestation” (EUI2008-03812) and on national projects for the study of political attitudes and the Political use of the Internet in Spain. He has published on contentious politics, online social networks and protest, and political use of the internet on electoral campaigns. His current research deals with electoral outcomes of protest, the potential of social media on political equality, attitudes and effects of exposure to disagreement and on interactions between elites and issue publics.

Jordi Muñoz is a ‘Juan de la Cierva’ postdoctoral researcher at the Political Science department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona since september 2009. He works at the research group “Democracy, elections and citizenship”. He got his PhD in political science from the Political and Social Science department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he was a teaching assistant and lecturer until 2009. He has also been at the University of Gothenburg as a visiting scholar (2012), at Yale University as a visiting assistant in research (2007-08) thanks to a fellowship from ‘Obra Social la Caixa’ and at the Essex Summer School on Social Science Data Analysis and Collection, were he was a teaching assistant in 2005. His research interests are mainly related to the empirical study of political attitudes and preferences. Currently his research is concentrated on the mechanisms that explain the low levels of electoral punsihment of corruption, as well as on the consequences of the economic crisis on political involvement and attitudes. His dissertation explored the political determinants and mechanisms of change in Spanish national identity since the transition to democracy. He teaches electoral analysis at the undergraduate level, as well as quantitative research techniques at the masters level. He has also thaught at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2003-2009) and at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. For more information visit: http://gent.uab.cat/jmunoz/content/english

Guillem Rico received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he currently holds postdoctoral research position. Between 2009 and 2011, he visited the University of California, Santa Barbara and Berkeley, with the support of a mobility grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Fulbright Scholar Program. He has also been awarded a Ramón y Cajal fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (2014-2019). His research interests include voting behavior, public opinion, and political leadership. His work has been published in journals such as Political Psychology, Electoral Studies, and South European Society & Politics. He is author of a book on the perception and electoral influence of party leaders in Spain (Líderes políticos, opinión pública y comportamiento electoral en España. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2009). He is member of the research group on Democracy, Elections and Citizenship at UAB.