Catherine Moez

Introduction

Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings at Royal Holloway, University of London (Feb. 2024 - Aug. 2025). You can contact me at catherine.moez [at] rhul.ac.uk.

Previously: PhD, Political Science, at the University of Toronto (Nov. 2024). See my thesis here. I am now developing this work into an academic book project.

I am interested in quantitative research methodologies, especially with 'unstructured' text and audio data. Substantially, I am interested in how political discontentment develops and surfaces. As a primary focus in this research programme, I use quantitative techniques to explore how politicians of different types (mainstream, anti-establishment) speak and how audiences react.

January 2025: Irish language text resources

For those working with the Irish/Gaelic language, I have posted a wordlist of over 20,000 words to facilitate using and/or detecting Irish text in your documents. The list and descriptions are on my Github at Irish Language Resources. There is an English translation of each word as well, and corpus counts from the past 20 years of the Irish Dáil.

November 2024: My PhD dissertation

My PhD dissertation, Political Disaffection and the Decline of the Centre: Quantitative Text Analysis Approaches, is now available on the University of Toronto's repository.

British Politics Resources

Voting records for the 2019-2024 Parliament are not available in full via The Public Whip, which has all other sessions since 1997. I have manually assembled all the divisions from the 2019-2024 House of Commons from the UK Parliament website. Please contact me if you would like access to this data.

Recent working papers

Arxiv preprint: Generic Embedding-Based Lexicons for Transparent and Reproducible Text Scoring. Data to be released here on my Github shortly, pending review.

Recent conference papers

Moez, Catherine, and Manos Tsakiris. 2024. "All the Same? Assessing the Politically Disaffected’s Responses to Political Persuasion." Poster presentation, Toronto--Montreal Political Behaviour Workshop. Montreal, Canada. September 27-28.

Moez, Catherine, and Randy Besco. 2024. "Who Raises Immigration on the Political Agenda? Evidence from Canadian News Media and Parliamentary Debates, 1988-2023." Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting. Montreal, Canada. June 12-14.

Moez, Catherine. 2023. "Audio data in populist political speakers' use of emotion." American Political Science Association annual meeting. Los Angeles, USA. September 2.

Moez, Catherine. 2023. "Free-Market Populism on the Canadian Right: A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of the Reform Party of Canada." Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting. Toronto, Canada. May 30.

Text analysis resources

See more text analysis resources (e.g., translations of existing lexicons) at my Github.

Additional elections datasets and parliamentary data

Australia: Australian MPs' party affiliations 2006-2024. Sourced from OpenAustralia.org for currently serving MPs and Wikipedia scraping (former MPs). March 28, 2024. I also have lists of 'soft' vs 'hard' left Labor MPs I am developing -- please contact if interested.