Rosalind Shorrocks
Dr Rosalind Shorrocks, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Manchester
I have been at the University of Manchester since September 2017, prior to which I completed a DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford. My research is in the area of gender and politics in Britain and Europe, with a particular focus on electoral politics, political behaviour, and social attitudes. I am particularly interested in how gender shapes public opinion and vote choice, as well as public attitudes towards gender, gender-roles, and feminism. I am also interested in the impact of socialisation experiences and generations on political behaviour.
My recent book Women, Men and Elections: Policy Supply and Gendered Voting Behaviour in Western Democracies explores the relationship between party policy supply and gender vote gaps across elections in Western democracies. In other recent projects I have analysed how perceptions of gender-based discrimination and sexism shape vote choice in British elections in collaboration with academics at the University of Oxford, University of Reading, and University College London. I am Principal Investigator on an ESRC Impact Acceleration Grant “Surveying Greater Manchester’s Women”, a collaborative project with local civil society organisations in Greater Manchester and the University of York to measure women’s experiences, preferences, and political behaviour at the local level.
Louise Luxton
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manchester. My primary research interests include gender and political communication, comparative party politics, and text-as-data approaches. I am particularly interested in how gender (and other identities) impacts the representation of women politicians in news media, as well as how it affects the communication strategies of political candidates during election campaigns. I also have an interest in party issue competition, particularly the communication strategies of small and niche parties in the European context. I primarily work with text data and have expertise in a range of mixed-method text analysis approaches.
I completed my PhD at Newcastle University in 2023. My thesis offers the first comparative empirical investigation of the issue concerns and strategic communication practices of European feminist parties and their candidates across election manifestos, news media, and social media.
Beyond my own research, I have previously worked as the UK country expert coder on the ProConEU Euromanifesto project and as a Quantitative Analyst on a variety of projects, most recently with the non-profit Raising Films investigating the impact of COVID-19 on parents and carers in the television and film industries.