Rachel Gibson is a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, where her research focuses on how digital technologies are changing the way in which election campaigns are fought and won. 

Professor Gibson’s work is comparative in nature with a particular focus on developments in the UK, the U.S., Germany, Australia and France. In 1996, she completed her PhD on the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Europe at Texas A&M University in the US. Since then, she has published a wide range of articles and books. 

Rachel has just completed a five-year study of Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy (DiCED), funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and she is Principal Investigator of the Smart Data Research UK project DIGISURVOR, which is examining the methodological and ethical challenges of linking individual-level survey and digital trace data. 

Between 2016 and 2019, Professor Rachel Gibson was the Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research at the University of Manchester. Previously, she was Deputy Director of the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at the Australian National University (2002-6). She was a Principal Investigator of the Australian Election Study from 2001 to 2019.

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