Rate My Professor Miriam Sorace

Dr Miriam Sorace is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. She earned a PhD in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Earlier academic qualifications include an MPhil and BA. Her career trajectory features previous assistant professorships at Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Kent, and Swansea University. Sorace has held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations and the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre. She also served as a Political Data Scientist at UK Labour Party headquarters, advising the Data, Strategy, and Elections teams during the 2024 General Election campaign. Currently, she is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics Data Science Institute and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Sorace specializes in electoral behaviour and public opinion analysis, with a focus on British and European politics, including the European Union. Her research employs experimental methods, survey gamification, machine learning techniques such as predictive modelling, and computational text-as-data approaches, including large language models, to study democratic resilience, persuasion, campaign strategy, policy responsiveness, and representation failures. As Principal Investigator, she leads the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project DIVIDED: Preventing the Polarizing Effects of Economic Inequality, awarded £1.2 million in 2024 to develop new datasets and methodologies addressing economic inequality and political polarization. She co-directs the Public Opinion Analytics Lab, a multi-university hub advancing survey methodology, and serves on the Executive Board of the European Election Study. Key publications include 'Dimension-specific party and public opinion responsiveness in the EU immigration acquis' (West European Politics, 2026, with N. Zaun), 'Vox populi, vox dei? The effect of sociotropic and egocentric incongruence on democratic preferences' (European Journal of Political Research, 2025, with D. Bolet), 'The Europeanisation of policy preferences: cross-national similarity and convergence 2014–2024' (Journal of European Public Policy, 2025), 'Reforming supranational institutions: insights from a conjoint experiment in 16 countries' (European Union Politics, 2025, with C. de Vries and S. Hix), and 'A Tale of Two Peoples: Motivated Reasoning in the aftermath of the Brexit Vote' (Political Science Research and Methods, 2021, with S.B. Hobolt).