Rosario Aguilar

Senior Lecturer: Comparative Politics, Newcastle University
I am a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics focused on comparative political behaviour, survey, and experimental research. I am also the Politics Postgraduate Research co-Director (with Dr Terri Teo).

I have been involved in large survey projects like the Mexican National Elections Study that is part of the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems. I am a member of the Revista Latinoamericana de Opinión Pública's editorial board and Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Evidence and Governance in Politics network (EGAP)

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students in the area of political psychology focused on electoral behaviour, campaign communication, electoral polls, emotions, prejudice.

My research looks at the interaction of prejudice and context on people’s political behaviour. For example, using experimental methods I have looked at the influence of candidates and voters' racial appearance (phenotypes) as well as gender on voters' preferences in Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S.A. I have also looked at the effect of party labels in Mexico and Uganda. I have analyzed the role of emotions as moderators of political judgment in Hungary.

I am also working in projects related to survey and experimental methods. I am interested in investigated the factors that affect the level of accuracy in pre-electoral polls across different contexts. Currently I am developing a project on motivated reasoning in the UK with Dr Michael Traugott.

I also enjoy teaching. I have previously taught different courses: 1) Introduction to Comparative Politics; 2) Psychological Processes of Racial Prejudice in the U.S.A.; 3) Construction of Mexico's National Identity and Racial Ideology; 4) Public Opinion and Political Behavior; and 5) Political Psychology and Experimental Methods.