Fellows

Part-time Assistant Professor

Jessica Di Cocco holds a PhD in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies from Sapienza University, Department of Economics and Law. Although her background is in Political Science and Economics, she looks closely at cross-fertilisation with Computer Science and employs machine learning tools. Jessica is interested in voting and party behaviour, text-as-data, affective polarisation, misinformation, social networks, and inequality of opportunities.

As a Max Weber Fellow, Jessica works on text-based approaches to the study of populism and adjacent topics. She is interested in measuring the populist phenomenon using textual sources, the use of sentiments and emotions in electoral campaigns, and comparative analyses of historical trends through textual analysis. She also deals with more theoretical aspects of using texts to investigate party behaviour and is interested in studying expert and non-expert positions on sensitive topics. She is also fascinated by exploring the nexus between inequality and voting behaviour using less conventional datasets, such as anonymised geolocalised data.

As an adjunct professor, Jessica taught Political Economy at the University of Tuscia (DEIM) for the academic year 2020-2021. In 2022, she held courses and workshops at the University of Lucerne, Masaryk University in Brno and Sapienza University in Rome.

Alexandra Jabbour, Max Weber Fellow

Max Weber Fellow

Alexandra Jabbour is a political scientist who did her undergraduate and doctoral studies at the Université de Montréal in Canada. During her PhD Alexandra was a visiting fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Alexandra’s research focuses on the intersection of political opinion, geography, and economy. She also explores topics related to political behaviour, group identity, and the political implications of the housing market. She uses quantitative methods with a keen interest for causal inference, employing experimental designs or quasi-experiments.

In her dissertation, Alexandra examined how an individual’s everyday environment and repeated exposure to a familiar setting shape their perception, particularly economic perceptions.

As a Max Weber Fellow, she will work on publishing the remaining articles from her dissertation while starting new research projects. She will study the impact of upward economic mobility on political attitudes and investigate the political consequences of the housing market.

Alexandra has gained valuable experience as both a Teaching Assistant and a Lecturer. As a Lecturer, she has taught courses on Political Behaviour and Political Representation at the undergraduate level. Additionally, she has served as a Teaching Assistant for various courses, including Elections, Political Science Research Methods, Canadian Political Institutions, Politics and Economy, Introduction to Political Science, and a graduate seminar on US Politics.

Jonne Kamphorst, Advanced PhD Researcher

Jonne Kamphorst is a political scientist utilising experimental methods to study political persuasion, with a focus on how social divisions influence the various techniques that politicians, parties, and other organizations use to influence public opinion. His work includes survey and field experiments on the politics of coalition building in Europe. Prior to coming to the EUI, he gained an MPhil in Comparative Politics from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics.