About

I am a Chair in Future Governance, Public Policy and Technology at the University of Edinburgh, where I am affiliated with the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, for which I also direct the MSc Future Governance.

I study political communication in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on digital media. My research investigates how political parties, campaign organizations and citizens engage with one another on digital media, and how in the process they negotiate meanings, identities, resources, and, ultimately, power.

From 2026-28, I will serve as Vice Chair of the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association. In this capacity, I will be responsible for planning the division’s program for the next two annual meetings (Glasgow 2027 and Bangkok 2028), and will then become the division’s Chair for 2029-30, serving on the ICA Board of Directors.

From 2019 until 2024, I served as Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Press/Politics (IJPP), an interdisciplinary journal for the analysis and discussion of the role of the press and politics in a globalized world. I am currently a member of the Editorial Boards of The International Journal of Press/Politics. Political Communication, Journalism and Media, and of the Italian journals Comunicazione Politica and Rivista di Digital Politics.

I previously served as a Co-Rapporteur for two Committees of Experts of the Council of Europe: on “Freedom of Expression and Digital Technologies” (2020-21) and on “the Integrity of Online Information” (2022-23). I also served as the chair of the Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (2020).

Previously, I was Professor of Political Communication at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, where I served as the Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture. I also taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Bologna.

My latest book, written with Augusto Valeriani (University of Bologna), is titled Outside the Bubble: Social Media and Political Participation in Western Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2021). Based on unique, custom-built survey data on samples representative of internet users across a diverse sample of nine Western democracies, we argue that social media are redefining the ways in which citizens encounter and engage with political information and that, overall, these changes have positive implications for political participation in Western democracies. The book is one of the main outputs of a three-year comparative research project on social media and political participation funded by the Italian Ministry of Education with more than 900,000 Euros, for which I served as Principal Investigator between 2013 and 2016. The book received the 2022 Best Book Award by the Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

My first book, titled Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), shed light on how parties structure their online presence to inform and mobilize citizens, and on how citizens use the internet to gather political information in seven Western democracies (Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 2006 and 2010. My research has been published across the main journals in the field, including Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Political Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, Information, Communication & Society, and International Journal of Communication. I am a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Language and Politics and serve in the editorial committee of Comunicazione Politica (ComPol), the leading Italian journal in political communication. From 2014 until 2018, I served as book reviews editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics.

I have been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and American University. I am also a research associate of the Center for Social Media and Politics of New York University.

I have supervised seven PhDs to completion and am interested in supervising doctoral research in a wide range of topics in political communication, based on a variety of methodological approaches and disciplinary backgrounds.