Biography
James Dennison is part-time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, where he leads the Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration (OPAM) – the first observatory to collect and produce comprehensive, international data on public attitudes toward migration. His research interests include political attitudes, psychology and behaviour, the politics of migration and research methods. His work primarily covers Europe as well as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Between 2019 and 2022, James Dennison will also be running a research project at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, the Juan March Institute in Madrid and the University of Stockholm, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Dennison’s research project seeks to explain the dramatic electoral changes in Europe in the 21st century. The project will theorise and test using advanced econometric methods the relationships between the salience of political issues and the electoral success of party families across Europe. It will then identify the antecedents of variation in issue salience, such as real-world trends, events and the actions of media and politicians, to offer a holistic explanation of electoral changes. This project will offer deeper insights into political psychology and behaviour. James Dennison has published in numerous international academic journals, such as the Journal of European Public Policy, European Union Politics, Party Politics, The International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Political Quarterly, and Mediterranean Politics. He is also the author of The Greens in British Politics (Palgrave, 2016). He has held positions at the University of Oxford and University of Sheffield, where he taught quantitative methods, and received his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the EUI in 2017. He regularly advises European and international organisations on the politics of migration. He previously worked at the European Commission and the British Houses of Parliament.