I’m a political scientist and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Southampton, UK (April 2024-). Between 2022-2023, I was a (tenure-track) Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona. During the summer of 2023, I was a British Academy Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings, University of London, where, in collaboration with Prof. Manos Tsakiris, I carried out an interdisciplinary research on political emotions.
My Cambridge Elements in Political Psychology Book (under contract with CUP, under review) investigates the role of empathy for the other in motivating more reflective political reasoning in citizens.
My primary research interests lie at the intersection of political psychology, political communication and democratic innovations. More specifically, I study how (a) different political institutions, and (b) political emotions influence individuals’ political opinion formation on a range of issues, such as climate change, universal basic income, abortion, and covid-19, among others. I’m also interested in intergroup contact in non-democratic settings, correcting public misperceptions, democracy promotion in autocracies and oil-rich autocracies.
I hold a PhD from the Centre for Political Science Research, KU Leuven (University of Leuven) (Belgium) (2021). My PhD thesis, awarded with the Best Political Science PhD in 2021 by Belgian and Dutch Political Science Associations, and the honorary mention of the Best Political Communication Dissertation Award of the APSA & ICA Political Communication Divisions 2021, combined survey and lab experiments with observational and qualitative data to gain insight into the processes underlying individuals’ political opinion formation.
Between 2021-2022, I was a postdoctoral researcher on a H2020 project focusing on a comparative study of the potential of participatory institutions to address the challenges of liberal representative democracies. I have also held visiting positions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford (2018), University of Temple, (2020), University of Canberra (2020), University of Barcelona (2021) and ESADE Business School (2021).
As a social scientist, I’m committed to interdisciplinary research and open science practices.
I’m also on Twitter and Google Scholar.
Lala Muradova 