I am an Associate Professor in Political Behaviour in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and hold a D.Phil (2015) from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. I am affiliated with the LSE Data Science Institute and the LSE Electoral Psychology Observatory. I am also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in KCL's Quantitative Political Economy Group and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna's Department of Government.
As a behavioural political scientist I study partisan election campaigns, predominantly in the UK and in Continental Europe, to identify the causal effects of formal and informal interactions between campaigns and citizens on electoral mobilization, voter registration, opinion change, media effects, and political activism. I am particularly interested in how politicians can effectively communicate to supporters of rival parties, and how political influence diffuses in social networks such as the household, the neighbourhood, and in online networks. I test how campaigns affect citizens' political behaviour in homogeneous and mixed partisan contexts.
My methodological expertise is in embedded experimentation, the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized field experiments in co-operation with political parties and candidates, as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. I design spillover experiments to identify causal effects in social networks, and combine field experiments with detailed campaign data. I also use natural and quasi-experiments for causal inference, applying regression discontinuity, and difference-in-differences designs to research questions that interest me from a substantive point of view.
Some of my work on the attitudinal and behavioural consequences of interactions between campaigns and citizens has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, the European Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. I have also published on party competition in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. My co-authors include Daniel Bischof, Diane Bolet, Eline de Rooij, Elias Dinas, Fabrizio Gilardi, Vicky Fouka, Peter John, Nikolay Marinov, Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, Asli Unan and Alexander Wuttke.
At the LSE, I teach courses on political behaviour, quantitative research methods and experimental political science. I also regularly teach workshops on causal inference and field experiments in the UK and abroad. I am a member of EGAP, and co-organize the European Workshop in Empirical Political Science (EuroWEPS). Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in doing a PhD at the LSE in areas related to my research interests.
You can follow me on Bluesky @florianfoos.bsky.social and Twitter @FlorianFoos.
