Matthew Blayney

Sociology (2021 cohort)

Political behaviour. Especially how the formation of political dispositions can be shaped by institutional environments, such as electoral systems or the way career or social media environments are structured. 

Before starting the MSc, I completed a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, also at the University of Oxford. My undergraduate thesis was on how electoral systems affect the behaviour of legislators in parliament. I used machine learning for natural language processing to compare speeches in parliament to manifesto documents as a measure of how partisan an MP’s behaviour is.