Comparative Politics and Policy (CPP)

The Comparative Politics and Policy (CPP) research centre

The Comparative Politics and Policy (CPP) research centre is dedicated to the empirical and theoretically informed study of political institutions, processes, actors and ideologies in the United Kingdom and beyond. Using a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, its members pursue original research on contemporary challenges in the fields of democratic participation and trust, multi-level governance, digital technologies, multiculturalism, migration, populism and party politics, human rights, and environmental protection. As well as enabling internal collaborations, the Centre regularly hosts external speakers and engages with practitioners in government, civil society and various professions. Members include researchers at all stages of their careers in Swansea University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy and International Relations, as well as partners in other institutions.

Affiliated with:

Faculty Research Institute in Policy and Practice

Faculty Research Institute in Geo-Political Challenges

Faculty Climate Action Research Network

Faculty Research Institute in Cultures and Communities

Faculty AI and Digital Economy and Society Research Network

People

Co-Director

Dr Dilling is a comparative politics scholar who researches why and how political parties change and what this means for the resilience of democracy. His sole-authored and collaborative research has been funded by, among others, the John Fell Fund, the International Association for the Study of German Politics, and Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations.

Matthias Dilling

Co-Director

Dr Dupont is a scholar of the politics of race, ethnicity, and religion. He researches anti-discrimination policy, employment and education inequalities, and human rights claims. Among other projects, he is currently completing a monograph entitled Anti-racism, multiculturalism and human rights, under contract with Palgrave.

Pier-Luc Dupont

Staff Members

Staff Member	Background
Dr Dion Curry: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/d.s.d.curry/	Dr Curry is an Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy, working on political trust, political legitimacy, governance, expertise/epistemic communities, and disruptive technologies. He also serves as the Research Lead of Swansea’s School of Social Sciences and the unit’s Deputy Environment Lead for REF’28. Among other projects, he currently investigates the psychological underpinnings of citizen perceptions of trust in expertise, supported by a MASI Summit Grant led by Dr Gabi Jiga-Boy (School of Psychology), and the impact and governance of blockchain technology.
Dr Bettina Petersohn: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/b.petersohn/	Dr Petersohn is a Senior Lecturer in Politics, working on comparative federalism, intergovernmental coordination, and local democracy. She serves as the Co-Lead of the Horizontal Coordination Working Group of IGCOORD (Intergovernmental Coordination from Local to European Governance). Among other projects, her research currently focuses on local government coordination in the UK, with a special focus on the relation between political and economic factors, political homophily, and problem pressure. In addition, Dr Petersohn works with UK and international scholars on a survey project on municipal councillors in Europe, focusing on their autonomy, policy influence, and public perception across institutional contexts.
Dr Caner Sayan: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/r.c.sayan/	Dr Sayan is a Lecturer in Policy Analysis who specializes in the politics of water, environmental justice, water governance, and climate change. He has a special interest in climate change adaptation in Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East. Among other projects, he is currently working on drought resilience of smallholder farmers in Kenya and water and regionalism in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin. Dr Sayan serves on the steering committee of Swansea’s Climate Action Research Institute and the Faculty’s Climate Action Research Network.
Dr Kristan Stoddart: https://www.swansea.ac.uk/staff/k.d.stoddart/	Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor for Cyber Threats in the School of Social Sciences and also works with the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law. He is a member of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2022 he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). He has recently completed three books, including Cyberwar: Threats to Critical Infrastructure (Palgrave/Springer, 2022). The other books respectively examine Russia’s cyber offensive against the West and China’s embrace of offensive cyber espionage. In addition, he is engaged in a research project examining EU resilience to hybrid warfare funded by the European Union.
Dr Jack Tudor: https://wiserd.ac.uk/people/jack-tudor/	Having recently completed his PhD in Politics, Dr Tudor is now working as a Research Assistant in the Department of Economics at Swansea University. He works on the ‘Populism, Conflict, and Political Polarisation’ work package of the ESRC-funded Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). Dr Tudor’s research seeks to better understand the nature of pre-election polling error in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Beyond this, his ongoing work aims to more accurately map polling error as a multi-level phenomenon and to unpack the nature of political polarisation surrounding the Euro-Atlantic ambitions of the country of Georgia.
Dr Matthew Wall: m.t.wall@swansea.ac.uk	Dr Wall is an Associate Professor in Politics and Head of the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and International Relations. His research is on comparative politics, elections and public opinion, election forecasting, vote advice applications, and electoral systems. Dr Wall’s research has been supported, among others, by The Robert Carr Fund, the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, and the Learned Society of Wales. His current projects focus on digital politics, including the use of non-partisan innovations like voting advice applications in election campaigns, real-time election forecasting, and democratic engagement.

Student Members

Student	Background
Louis Bromfield: https://wiserd.ac.uk/people/louis-bromfield/	Louis is a researcher of political engagement, gamification, political forecasting and participation. He holds a BA in Politics and an MSc in Computer Science from Swansea University, and is in the examination process of his PhD, funded by the Swansea University Research Excellence Scholarship. In 2022 he used a UKRI Challenges fund worth £12,932 to conduct a field experiment with 500 participants using his own forecasting website. He aims to continue his research on gamified political forecasting, looking to cover more elections to add to his PhD’s focus on the UK Local Elections in May 2023.
Keiron Burgess	Keiron is a PhD student at Swansea University, whose research focusses on the interplay between Pandemic-Level Health Crises (PLHC) and the democratic trajectory of hybrid political regimes. It raises the argument that PLHCs puncture the equilibrium and require a political response through policies within the crisis management process, with such responses holding the ability to provide pathways of centralised decision making or political co-optation. This leads the thesis to discuss the input and output elements of legitimacy and the importance that they hold towards the possible democratisation, or autocratisation, of hybrid regimes.

Student

Background

Louis Bromfield:

https://wiserd.ac.uk/people/louis-bromfield/

Louis is a researcher of political engagement, gamification, political forecasting and participation. He holds a BA in Politics and an MSc in Computer Science from Swansea University, and is in the examination process of his PhD, funded by the Swansea University Research Excellence Scholarship. In 2022 he used a UKRI Challenges fund worth £12,932 to conduct a field experiment with 500 participants using his own forecasting website. He aims to continue his research on gamified political forecasting, looking to cover more elections to add to his PhD’s focus on the UK Local Elections in May 2023.

Keiron Burgess

Keiron is a PhD student at Swansea University, whose research focusses on the interplay between Pandemic-Level Health Crises (PLHC) and the democratic trajectory of hybrid political regimes. It raises the argument that PLHCs puncture the equilibrium and require a political response through policies within the crisis management process, with such responses holding the ability to provide pathways of centralised decision making or political co-optation. This leads the thesis to discuss the input and output elements of legitimacy and the importance that they hold towards the possible democratisation, or autocratisation, of hybrid regimes.

PhD Projects

Keiron Burgess

Keiron Burgess: Input and Output Legitimacy. The Varying Democratic Trajectory of Hybrid Regimes in the Face of Pandemic-Level Health Crises.

Keiron Burgess is a PhD student at Swansea University who’s research focusses on the interplay between Pandemic-Level Health Crises (PLHC) and the democratic trajectory of hybrid political regimes. It raises the argument that PLHC’s puncture the equilibrium and require a political response through policies within the crisis management process, with such responses holding the ability provide pathways of centralised decision making or political co-optation. This leads the thesis to discuss the input and output elements of legitimacy and the importance that they hold towards the possible democratisation, or autocratisation, of hybrid regimes.

Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield: Investigating the impact of gamified forecasting on political engagement.

This interdisciplinary thesis examines the impact of using a website called Fantasy Forecast, an online political forecasting platform. The site was gamified - the application of gaming elements to non-gaming contexts, to try to create an intrinsically-motivating experience for users, encouraging them to use the site more. Participants were recruited to forecast the UK 2023 Local Elections (with 1,368 predictions submitted). Findings include the engagement traits (knowledge, interest, and efficacy) being hard to change in the short-term, higher self-assessed knowledge leading to bolder prediction confidence, and level of site use and performance having significant effects on psychological need satisfaction.

Garrett King

Garrett King: The Peanut Kingdom: People & Policy in Caddo County, Oklahoma 1938-2002.

Garrett King is a PhD student at Swansea University and Vice President for Institutional Advancement as well as Chief of Staff to the President at the Southwestern Oklahoma State University. King’s thesis examines the rise and evolution of the federal peanut quota supply management policy during the New Deal era and the policy’s evolution until its abolition in 2002. Peanut quota, combined with improved irrigation technologies and techniques and the sandy loam soil of Caddo County, helped to facilitate the growth of peanut farming in rural Oklahoma during the postwar period. Using oral histories and unpublished primary sources, King relates the story of how public policy impacted community life over several decades.

Selected Academic Publications

Bettina Petersohn

“Territorial Politics and Institutional Change: A Comparative-Historical Analysis.” Special issue Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2017, 48 (1): 1 – 25 (guest editor with Jörg Broschek and Simon Toubeau), https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjx059
“Negotiating territorial change in multinational states: Party preferences, negotiating power and the role of the negotiation mode.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2015, 45(4): 626 – 652 (with Nathalie Behnke and Eva Maria Rhode), https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjv016
“Between Autonomy and Interdependence: The Challenges of Shared Rule after the Scottish Referendum.” Political Quarterly, 2015, 86(2): 192 – 200 (with Nicole McEwen), https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12162

Caner Sayan

“Barriers to powering past coal: Implications for a just energy transition in South Africa.” Energy Research & Social Science, 2023, 101: 103122 (with Pegah Mirzania, Joel A. Gordon, Nazmiye Balta-Ozkan, and Lochner Marais), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103122
“The co-constitution of regional politics and massive infrastructures in the Transaqua water project.” Territory, Politics, Governance, 2022 online first: 1 – 21 (with Nidhi Nagabhatla), https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2043178
“Water and ‘imperfect peace’ in the Euphrates–Tigris river basin.” International Affairs, 2021, 97(1): 139 –155 (with Aysegül Kibaroglu), https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa161 .

Dion Curry

Network approaches to multi-level governance: Structures, relations and understanding power between levels. Palgrave: 2015, https://link.springer.com/book/9781137295170.
“A Bibliometrics Approach to Understanding Conceptual Breadth, Depth and Development: The Case of New Public Management.” Political Studies Review, 2018, 16(2): 113-124 (with Steven van de Walle), https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929916644869.
“The Question of EU Legitimacy in the Social OMC Peer Review Process.” Journal of European Social Policy, 26(2): 168-182, https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928716637141.

Jack Tudor

“A moving target? An analysis of the impact of electoral context on polling error variation in both British and international general elections.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 2024, 34(1): 18-40 (with Matt Wall), https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2021.1972305.

Kristan Stoddart

Cyberwarfare: Threats to Critical Infrastructure. Cham: Springer/Palgrave, 2022, link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-97299-8 .
“Edward Snowden and PRISM: Negotiating the Post 9/11 ‘Surveillance State’.” In Contextualizing Security: A Reader, eds. Tobias T. Gibson and Kurt W. Jefferson, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2022.
The British Nuclear Experience: The Roles of Beliefs, Culture and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 (with John Baylis), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198702023.001.0001

Matthias Dilling

Parties under pressure. The politics of factions and party adaptation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024.
“Analyzing failed institutional change attempts.” Political Research Quarterly, 2022, 75(1): 203-2015 (with Sukriti Issar), https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912921989442.
“Denominational Conflicts and Party Breakthrough: The Negative Case of the All-German People’s Party.” Social Science History, 2022, 46(3): 505-529, https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2022.1.

Matthew Wall

“The ties that bind: How the dominance of WeChat combines with guanxi to inhibit and constrain China’s contentious politics.” New Media & Society, 2019, 21(8), 1714-1733 (with Yan Wu), https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819830072.
“Internet Effects in Times of Political Crisis.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 2016, 80(2), 411-436 (with Leonardo Baccini and Laura Sudulich), https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfv055.
“Wired Voters: The Effects of Internet Use on Voters’ Electoral Uncertainty.” British Journal of Political Science, 2015, 45(04), 853-881 (with Laura Sudulich and Leonardo Baccini), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123413000513.

Pier-Luc Dupont

“The relation between multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism in UK diversity politics.” Identities, 2023, 30(6): 785-804 (with Thomas Sealy and Tariq Modood), https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2023.2186622.
“Religious governance and the politics of equality in education.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022, 45(5): 966-987, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.190586.
“Perpetuating Anti-Muslim Discrimination through the Interpretation of Religious Equality in the European Court of Human Rights.” Journal of Muslims in Europe, 2018, 7(1): 27-46, https://doi.org/10.1163/22117954-12341343.

News and Events

Conference

On 31 May 2023, the research group hosted a 1-day conference on the topic of “Democratic Resilience and Democratic Innovation” at Swansea’s Singleton Campus. With democracies around the world under pressure to respond to major challenges, including climate change, health crises, the rise of the far right, and heightened social inequality, the conference brought together scholars from across Swansea’s School of Social Sciences to discuss and examine the actions and innovations that have started emerging in response to the recent years of social, economic, and political turmoil. The conference program can be found here - PAG Resilience and democratic programme.

Early research idea session Peer learning session Methods reading group Grants and bid writing

Comparative Politics and Policy (CPP)

The Comparative Politics and Policy (CPP) research centre

People

Co-Director

Co-Director

PhD Projects

Selected Academic Publications

News and Events

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