Michele Scotto di Vettimo

Michele Scotto di Vettimo

Research Fellow

King's College London

About me

I am a Research Associate/Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Previously, I worked as Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Exeter.

I am an empirical political scientist studying how policymakers represent and respond to inputs coming from society and citizens, particularly in the context of European governance. In my research, I use quantitative methodologies – especially surveys and computational text analysis – to study public attitudes, political behaviour, policy outputs, and their relationship.

My current project is about decision-making in the European Council, but I also do research on democratic representation, public attitudes, populism and political behaviour.

I obtained my PhD in Political Science from the King’s College London. I am also member of the European Political Science Society (EPSS), the Political Science Association of the United Kingdom (PSA), the Italian Political Science Association (SISP), and of the Quantitative and Computational Text Analysis Association (COMPTEXT).

Interests
  • Comparative politics
  • European Union
  • Political behaviour
  • Representation
  • Quantitative text analysis
Education

  • PhD in Political Science, 2022

    King's College, London

  • MSc in Public Administrations, 2016

    Bocconi University, Milan

  • MA in European Affairs, 2016

    SciencesPo, Paris

  • BA in Political Science, 2014

    University of Naples

Featured Publications

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Michele Scotto di Vettimo (2026). Talking Heads: Communication and responsiveness at the European Council. Journal of European Public Policy, Online First, 1-27.

Article Data Blogpost

Paolo Marzi, Michele Scotto di Vettimo (2026). Whom do you serve? A comparative analysis of congruence between party representatives, voters, and economic elites (2007 - 2017). European Political Science Review, 18(3): 410-428.

Article Data

Andrei Zhirnov, Jan Philipp Thomeczek, Lorenza Antonucci, Michele Scotto di Vettimo, Roan Buma, Vladimir Cristea, Norbert Kersting, Andre Krouwel, Stephan Lange, Alberto Lopez Ortega, Jack Thompson, Roberta Di Stefano, Francesco Ruggeri (2026). A Populist Axis? Analyzing Connections between Populist, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Political Space. Comparative Political Studies, Online First. 1-42.

Article Data

Michele Scotto di Vettimo, Christel Koop (2026). Technocrats, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Policy Explanation. Governance, 39(1): e70103.

Article Data Blogpost

Michele Scotto di Vettimo, Amanda Haraldsson, Shota Gelovani, Susan Banducci, Karolina Koc-Michalska, Yannis Theocharis (2026). Research Challenges and Training Needs in Text Analysis for Political Science Research. European Political Science, 25: 116-128.

Article

Andrei Zhirnov, Jan Philipp Thomeczek, Michele Scotto di Vettimo, Alberto Lopez Ortega, Andre Krouwel, Lorenza Antonucci, Roberta Di Stefano, Norbert Kersting (2025). Do populist parties better represent their voters than mainstream parties? Evidence from the 2019 European Parliament Elections in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. Electoral Studies, 94: 102906.

Article Data

Christel Koop, Michele Scotto di Vettimo (2023). Do the media scrutinise central banking? Evidence from the Bank of England. European Journal of Political Economy, 77: 102296.

Article Data Blogpost

Michele Scotto di Vettimo (2022). Measuring public support for European integration using a Bayesian IRT model. European Union Politics, 23(2): 171-191.

Article Data Blogpost

Projects

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All European Union Public opinion Text analysis

scRapEU: An R function to scrape data on EU laws

This project presents an easy to use R function to automatically download key data and textual information on EU laws from the European Parliament’s Legislative Observatory and EUR-Lex websites.

R code Documentation

Bank of England Speeches Dataset

The dataset contains a corpus of 1,390 speeches of Bank of England officials delivered between 1997 and 2025, manually annotated with numerous covariates.

Data

Tracking Euroscepticism (across time and space)

This post aims at tracking the level of support for European integration over a very long time frame in all the member states of the European Union. It covers the overall support for the European Union and to the support for European integration in the areas of asylum and immigration policies, fiscal and economic affairs, internal market and consumer policies; and social and welfare policies.

A survey of the research challenges and training needs in text analysis for political science research

This online survey assessed the research challenges, training needs and preferences of researchers and practitioners (of all seniority and skills level) that use or are interested in using text analysis techniques in their research. The survey has been conducted within the context of the Horizon 2020 OPTED project.

Data Documentation

Teaching

Current teaching activity

Course convenor

Past teaching activity

Teaching assistant

  • Introduction to Social Data, University of Exeter, (2023-2024)
  • Data Analysis for Social Sciences, University of Exeter, (2022-2023)
  • Introduction to Political Sciences, King’s College London, (2018-2021)
  • Comparative Political Systems, King’s College London, (2018-2021)
  • Integration of the European Union, King’s College London, (2018-2020)

Dissertation supervisor

  • Undergraduate, University of Exeter, (2022-2023)

Contacts