Dr Elena Gadjanova

I am a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics and co-founder and co-director (2024-2025) of the Exeter Centre for Research on Africa (ECRA). My research looks at how politicians win support in ethnically diverse societies and how digital technologies are changing politics across Africa.

I work on three connected questions: how parties and candidates appeal to voters across ethnic lines; how social media and messaging apps are reshaping campaigns, political communication, and misinformation; and what all of this means for democracy, accountability, and the relationship between citizens and the state. My fieldwork spans Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia, I use both qualitative and quantitative research methods, and my work has appeared in a number of journals including Comparative Political Studies, Political Behavior, African Affairs, and Party Politics.

I also write regularly for policy audiences and have advised the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) on elections, digital technologies, and misinformation in Africa.

Current research projects:

Off-Bench: Judges' Off-Bench Activities — Evidence and Theory on Judicial Politics from Africa (2026–2031) I am a Co-Investigator on this Horizon Europe ERC Advanced Grant, led by Professor Gabrielle Lynch at the University of Warwick. The project is the first systematic study of what judges in Africa do outside the courtroom and what this means for judicial independence, public trust in courts, and democracy. I lead the survey design and data analysis.

E-citizens: The Role of Technology in Shaping Citizen-State Relations in Africa (2025–2026) Between June 2025 and June 2026, I held a British Academy Innovation Fellowship, embedded with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The fellowship examined how growing access to digital technologies and social media is changing politics, campaigning, electoral integrity, and the spread of misinformation in a number of African states, and fed directly into FCDO work on democracy support and countering disinformation. Read more about it here.

Misinformation in African elections I am currently writing up findings from list experiments in Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia on who shares fake news and why campaigns spread misinformation in closely fought elections, alongside work on how digital tools can slowly erode electoral integrity.

Past funded projects:

Political communication and misinformation on social media in Northern Ghana (2019) As Principal Investigator on two Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grants, I led research on how social media shapes political mobilisation and how misinformation travels across digital divides — including to people who are not online themselves. Alongside several journal articles, the project produced the report Social Media, Cyber Battalions, and Political Mobilisation in Ghana (with Gabrielle Lynch, Jason Reifler, and Ghadafi Saibu), which was presented to the FCDO and has been cited by Freedom House, among others.

Whose Lives Matter? Race, Gender and Childhood in (Post-)Humanitarian Campaigning (2020) Co-Investigator, with Prof. Stacey Hynd and Dr. Sefina Dogo. Funded by the International Institute of Cultural Enquiry Development Fund.

Electoral appeals and identity formation in Ghana and Kenya (2016–2017) Funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, this project underpinned much of my published work on cross-ethnic campaign appeals and the strength of ethnic versus national identification.

Biography

I joined the University of Exeter Politics Department in 2018. Before Exeter, I was a Departmental Lecturer in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and an associate member of Nuffield College. I held a Fung Global Fellowship at Princeton University (2015–2016) — one of six awarded worldwide that year — and was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2013–2017). I have also taught at the Graduate Institute in Geneva and held a doctoral fellowship at Columbia University.

I completed my PhD in Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in 2013. I also hold an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a BA in International Relations from the University of Sussex.