Maria Grasso

Research Fellow

University of Southampton
School of Social Sciences
Southampton
SO17 1BJ

m.grasso@soton.ac.uk

Maria Grasso (1984) holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2005) and an MSc in Sociology (2006) from Oxford. She completed her PhD thesis on generational differences in political participation in Western Europe, for the DPhil Sociology at Nuffield College and the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford in 2010. She teaches politics and sociology at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. 

Maria's research interests are in political sociology, and in particular, age, period and cohort effects on Western European political participation; the impact of socialisation, political values, and education level on political participation; young people’s political involvement; protest and new social movements. Her academic work deals primarily with quantitative research and statistical analysis of cross-national surveys on political attitudes and behaviour, and, most recently, protest survey data. She is also interested in social theory and political thought.

She is currently working on two papers employing protest survey data collected for this project:   
(1) a comparative paper on persistent activists at the December 2009 climate change protests in Brussels, Copenhagen, London and Utrecht 
(2) a paper analysising the motives of activists attending the two 2010 national demonstrations against tuition fees and spending cuts in the UK

Country-team: United Kingdom