About us

About us

Members

With members drawn from a wide range of disciplines across the University, CEMaP has a large roster of research-intensive staff. The full list of each member's publications is found on their profile page.

About the Centre

Established in 2008, the Centre for Elections, Media & Participation (CEMaP) at the University of Exeter is a recognised university centre that brings together scholars from various disciplines such as politics, psychology and economics based in various colleges of the university. Covering a wide range of themes in comparative research and analysis (e.g. media studies, electoral research, institutional analysis, civil society research), CEMaP is dedicated to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on social and political participation that draws on a wide range of methodological tools available in the social sciences, reflecting broader university research priorities (see for details the Humanities and Social Sciences Strategy). To do so, we sponsor special workshops and events that bring together leading scholars from both British and international universities as well as students and PhD researchers working on related themes.

One of our priorities is to encourage and facilitate post graduate training. For instance:

• Members of CEMaP have been awarded a four year ESRC grant (2010-2014) to facilitate research and training in the area of Comparative Cross-National Electoral Research (CCNER).
• CEMaP members hold an EU Marie Curie European Industrial Doctorate (EID) grant on ‘Industry and Doctoral Training in Vote Advice Applications’ that involve staff with various disciplinary backgrounds and trains several PhD students.
• The centre further hosts an Intra-European Fellowship (IEF) on ‘Unstable Party Supply in Established and New Democracies: Causes and Electoral Consequences’. 'How Citizens Try to Influence Politics and Why (POLPART)', an ERC- funded project for which Clare Saunders (Politics) is the UK partner, includes a funded PhD studentship.
• Similarly, the ERC-funded project STATORG 'State Encroachment on Civil Society?', directed by CEMaP staff, includes two funded studentships and a postdoctoral research fellow.
• Exeter was the hub of ELECDEM, a Marie Curie Initial Training Network in electoral democracy that brought together 11 expert teams from 9 European countries and provided substantive and methodological training in elections research to a cohort of early stage and experienced researchers.

We are currently undertaking a number of projects that cover a wide range of themes both from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, that are funded by the European Research Council, British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Union, the Leverhulme Trust, the National Science Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation, and the New Zealand Electoral Commission. Our current projects involve collaboration with researchers at the University of Amsterdam, Australian National University, University of Sydney, University of Auckland, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Riverside, Carleton College, Dokuz Eylul University, Emory University, the European University Institute, University of Iowa, University of Cologne, University of Manchester, University of Minnesota, University of Oxford, Plymouth University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

We provide data and web based resources for projects that our staff are associated with such as the New Zealand Election Study. We have an ongoing relationship with another strong base of electoral research that is close at hand, The Elections Centre (TEC) at Plymouth University.