Biography

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.