Catherine Moez, PhD

Introduction

I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings at Royal Holloway, University of London (Feb. 2024 - Aug. 2025). Please feel free to contact me at catherine.moez [at] rhul.ac.uk.

I previously completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto, graduating in November 2024. My thesis, Political Disaffection and the Decline of the Centre: Quantitative Text Analysis Approaches, is now available on the university's repository here. It tracks how content and style in political speech have evolved for mainstream and unconventional speakers since the 1990s in the UK, as well as in Canada, Australia, and Ireland. 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. Substantively, I am interested in why and how political discontentment develops, and how politicians can start to rebuild trust.

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. I primarily engage with 'Anglosphere' countries but am now working with French and Argentine political video data, as well.

May 2025: Mapping in R

UK local elections 2025 results by vote share

UK local elections results by parties leading in seats

I've recently started working with maps data in R. For local authority lists and election results (currently covering England and Wales local elections from 2021 to May 2025), see my Github folder UK Local Authority Districts. The list may be helpful if you are using the ONS shapefiles for local authority districts.

January 2025: Irish language text resources

For those working with the Irish language/Irish Gaelic, 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.

British Politics

December 2024: Filling in missing Parliamentary voting data

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.