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Department of Political Science

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Professor Peter Dinesen

Headshot of Peter Dinesen
Professor of Political Science
Room: 
2.04, 36-38 Gordon Square
Email: p.dinesen@ucl.ac.uk
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Biography

I am a Professor of Political Science at UCL. I obtained my PhD in Political Science at Aarhus University (2011). After working at the University of Southern Denmark (2010-2011), I worked at the University of Copenhagen, where I maintain an affiliation.

Research

My research focuses on how individuals form beliefs and attitudes about other people, politics and society at large. 

My primary topic of interest has been generalised social trust – trust in unknown others - which is often considered “the social glue” that binds people together, enabling them to cooperate with positive downstream consequences for individuals and societies. In my work, I have tried to understand the causes of social trust; specifically the role of immigration and state institutions. 

Other lines of my work explore the sources of anti-immigrant/immigration sentiments and behaviors among the native-born, both in mass publics and among elected officials, and examine how political engagement is shaped by sociodemographic factors, personal experiences and personality traits.

In have also scrutinized the consequences of terrorism for both democratic citizenship (institutional trust and support for civil liberties) as well as mental health (e.g. diagnoses of mental disorders), and in previous work I have demonstrated how local economic signals (unemployment and housing prices) shape voting behavior and its anteceding perceptions. In an ongoing project, I examine a range of potential consequences of local economic inequality.

Publications

Book chapters
Journal articles

2022

2021

2020

2019

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

Teaching

I teach political behaviour and related fields. I am interested in supervising PhD students who would like to work on broadly understood social and political attitude and belief formation (e.g. social and political trust, attitudes toward immigrants/immigration, and political participation).