Laura Chaqués Bonafont is Professor of Political Science (UB) and research fellow at the IBEI. BA in Economics (UB), MA in Political Science (New School for Social Research, New York), Phd in Political Economy (UB), and visiting professor at the University of Washington, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill among others. She is the author of three books, and a large number of articles published in top academic journals. She is the director of the Spanish Policy Agendas Project (www.ub.edu/spanishpolicyagendas) a research project aimed to analyze policy dynamics across time, issues, countries and levels of government. The project establishes a link between policy dynamics research and other areas of concern within political science, mainly media studies, political representation and the quality of democracy in multilevel systems of governance. It also provides new tools for the development of quantitative measurement of policy dynamics. 

Research interests

My main research interests are (1) the analysis of agenda dynamics in a comparative perspective paying especial attention to the role of the media, and interest groups, and (2) the analysis of the quality of democracy in multilevel systems of governance. This means to explain to what extend Europeanization and increasing regionalism affects the capacity or/and willingness of policy makers to respond to electoral promises and citizen priorities; to analyze interest groups access to the policymaking process, and their mobilization strategies in a multilevel system of governance; and to analyze how the media affects the pattern of issue prioritization of political elites. To do that, I collaborate actively with an international network of scholars –the comparative agendas project—, aimed to provide new tools for the quantitative analysis of agenda dynamics across time, countries, policy issues and levels of governance.

Keywords

policy dynamics, media agenda setting, political representation, interest organisations