Jennifer Hudson

Senior Lecturer in Political Behaviour at UCL's Constitution Unit/Department of Political Science and Director of the UCL Q-Step Centre.

My research has developed along three lines. Primarily, I have been interested in the role of public knowledge, attitudes and opinions on policy outcomes and institutional arrangements. Here I have examined two very different policies in Britain—party/campaign finance and development assistance—and on party institutional arrangements in the US. A second line of research has examined aspects of campaigns and elections, including candidate spending and negative advertising. I am also interested in understanding the various trust judgements citizens bring to bear on parties and politicians.

I am currently working on an edited collection on the 2009 British MPs’ Expenses Scandal, forthcoming with Palgrave (2013). Together with Rosie Campbell (Birkbeck), I am working on a comprehensive project on parliamentary candidates in Britain. We aim to provide a publicly available database on post-war parliamentary candidates/MPs, and working with national and international partners, data and analyses of candidates’ attitudes, backgrounds and experiences. David Hudson (UCL) and I continue to investigate the determinants of public attitudes towards development assistance, and along with Andrew Darnton, we are developing projects around the 2013 Make Poverty History 2 campaign.