Biography

Laura Cabeza Perez obtained a PhD in Political Sciences (magna cum laude) in 2017 from the University of Cologne, Germany, and since then has been Senior Research Associate at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics.

She comes from Spain, where she graduated in Sociology (University of Barcelona) and obtained a master’s degree in Politics and Democracy (UNED) and a postgraduate diploma in Applied Social Research and Data Analysis (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas). Laura worked as a research assistant at the University of Deusto for 2 years, and she was researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC) between 2007 and 2011. In both institutions, she was involved in various research projects, mainly designing and analysing public opinion surveys.

She is mainly interested in decentralization, regional elections, political parties and voting behaviour. She has published articles in journals such as Electoral Studies, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Party Politics and Regional & Federal Studies.

Since 2010, Laura has been a member of the Regional Manifestos Project, a project that uses the quantitative content analysis of election manifestos of political parties to estimate their policy positions in regional elections. During the last eight years, she has collected, coded and analysed party manifestos to create an original dataset to study party competition at the regional level in two countries: Spain and the UK.

As a Max Weber Fellow, she plans to extend the Regional Manifestos Project to cover more cases, starting from Italy. She is particularly interested in analysing the policy positions of the Five Star Movement in the Italian regions. She also wants to explore further how decentralization affects the electoral success of populist parties in Europe.