Dr Catarina Thomson

Dr. Thomson is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations. Her background is in psychology and international relations, and she draws on both to understand the political behaviours and preferences of the mass public and political elites. Using a mix of quantitative, experimental, and qualitative methods she compares the commonalities and differences between these groups, as well as their policy implications for security and defence sectors in the UK, Europe and the United States.

Dr. Thomson joined the University of Exeter to help set up the Strategy and Security Institute (SSI), and has established a research programme in quantitative security studies in the UK. She created the first ever dataset of British expert and public opinion on contemporary security issues - the UK Security Survey- and helped lead a team of researchers from 12 universities in 8 countries to create a comparable survey on views on European Defence integration across the continent. Dr. Thomson’s work has been funded by organisations such the American National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the U.S. Department of Defense (through their Minerva Research Initiative).

Recent projects include an ESRC Future Research Leaders early career grant titled ‘Constraints on the Design of Security Policy: Insights from Audience Costs Theory and Security and Defence Elites in the United Kingdom’. In this three-year multi-methods project she examined how security policy is developed in the United Kingdom, and conducted the first-ever UK Security Survey which captures security preferences of UK security elites and members of the UK public.

Dr. Thomson also participated in the Volkswagen-Stiftung grant titled, ‘Fighting Together, Moving Apart? European Common Defence and Shared Security in an Age of Brexit and Trump’. The team fielded multi-wave surveys on national samples in Germany, France, and the UK, as well as a broader pan-European survey. They also conducted semi-structured elite interviews in France, Germany, the UK as well as with elites from the EU, NATO and other European countries. Project homepage: http://www.seceurity.eu/

Dr. Thomson is a research affiliate at START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism) at the University of Maryland, where she participated in the U.S. Department of Defense's Minerva-funded project, ‘Escalation Management in the Gray Zone: Understanding Decision Calculus and Conceptual Underpinnings’. She received an ESRC Impact Accelaration grant for the related project, 'Managing Escalation in Unconventional Conflicts: Operationalizing Tools for Defence Sectors in the United States and other NATO Member States'. Project homepage: https://www.icons.umd.edu/research/escalation-management

Dr. Thomson is unreasonably proud to be the latest winner of the University of Exeter’s ‘Whose Lecture is it Anyway’ Comedy Improv trophy!