Davide VITTORI

Bio

I am a post-doc at ULB and adjunct professor at LUISS University and Antwerp University; I have been working on the ERC Project "Non-elected politics. Cure or Curse for the Crisis of Representative Democracy?" since 2020. 

My research interests cover topics such as political parties, voting behaviour and public opinion, process preferences among others. My last book is “Southern European Challenger Parties against the Mainstream Podemos, SYRIZA, and MoVimento 5 Stelle in Comparative Perspective” (Routledge, 2022). My single-authored and co-authored papers have been published in Party Politics, Political Behaviour, Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Government & Opposition, Electoral Studies, South European Politics and Societies and others.
 

CV

• Post-doc, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (2020 - present)
• Adjunct professor at University of Antwerp (September 2020-present)
• Adjunct professor at Luiss University (2022 - present)
• Adjunct professor at University of Lille (2022 – 2023), European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL) Lille (2023-2024).
• Post-Doc, LUISS University (Oct. 2018-Jan 2020).
• Visiting researcher at University of Valencia (2022);
• Visiting PhD student European University Institute (2018);
• Ph.D. Student at LUISS University (2016-2018)
• Visiting student at Nijmegen University (2013)

Areas of research

• Voting behaviour and public opinion
• Political parties
• Political participation
• Process preferences
• Institutional trust
• Populism and authoritarianism

Teaching

Courses I have taught, co-taught or been appointed TA for in the past at various universities :

Political Participation and Governance. LUISS University

Introduction to Social and Political Analysis. LUISS University

Public Opinion and Elections. LUISS University

Experimental Political Science. ESPOL Lille

Comparative Political Institutions. University of Antwerp

Sociology of the European Union. University of Lille

Methods of Social Sciences. LUISS University

Data laboratory course: data analysis. LUISS University.

Comparative Politics. LUISS University.

Research

I obtained my PhD in Political Science at LUISS University under the supervision of prof. Leonardo Morlino in 2019. I was hired as a Post-doc at LUISS University (2018-2020), where I refined my research interests, focusing on some aspects that I could only partially develop during my PhD, namely the impact of populism on voting behaviour and the structural impact of populist parties in government on the quality of democracy.

Since March 2020, I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and part of an ERC project entitled "Non-elected politics. Cure or curse for the crisis of representative democracy?", coordinated by prof. Jean-Benoit Pilet. The project explores decision-making preferences in Europe: we are currently investigating European public support for technocracy, deliberative democracy, direct democracy and other forms of decision-making.

I am also interested in political participation and in explaining why people decide to participate in politics. For example, I co-authored a paper published in the European Journal of Political Research on the different participation profiles of European voters using latent class analysis. Furthermore, within the Galileo project, my colleagues and I worked on the evolution of participation inequalities in the electoral field.

Publications

Vittori, D. (2023). Southern European Challenger parties against the Mainstream. London: Routledge. [Pietro Grillo di Cortona Prize for the best book in the years 2023-2024] Vittori, D. & Paulis, E. (2024). Experts replacing governments? The socio‑cultural and authoritarian roots of citizens’ preferences for experts in government in 58 countries. Acta Politica. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-024-00357-3
 

Panel, S., Pilet, J.B, Rojon, S. and Vittori, D. (2023). The lure of technocrats: a conjoint experiment on preferences for technocratic ministers in six European countries. Political Behaviour, 46: 1961–1984 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09904-8
 

Vittori, D., Paulis, E., Pilet, J.B., Rojon, S. 2023. Do technocrats boost the acceptance of policy proposals among the citizenry? Evidence from a survey experiment in Italy. Electoral Studies, 81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102566