DAMIEN BOL
Sciences Po Paris
I'm a professor of political science at Sciences Po Paris, specializing in comparative politics and political behavior. I previously held a position at King’s College London for about eight years. I received my PhD in political science from UCLouvain in 2013, followed by a three-year postdoc at the University of Montreal.
My research examines how democracy, and particularly elections, shapes citizens’ attitudes and behavior, and, in turn, how citizens view and shape democratic institutions. I have published in a range of leading political science journals on these topics, including World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior. I have conducted about 20 surveys and experiments (in the lab, in the field, and in surveys), particularly in France, the UK, the US, Canada, and Belgium, which are my main countries of expertise.
Since September 2026, I'm have directed the consortium ELECTRANS conducting the French Election Study for the 2027 presidential and legislative elections. From January 2027, I'm also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Political Science, a journal of the American Political Science Association.
At this stage of my career, I am particularly proud of three things:
1. While I’m a political scientist by training, I frequently collaborate with economists. This led to publications in the Journal of Public Economics and other econ journals. I’m not sure economists have noticed yet that I’m not one of them.
2. My work is cited on the Wikipedia page on Democracy in several languages, including English, alongside some little-known scholars like Dahl and Przeworski.
3. One of my papers has been cited more than 1,000 times according to Google Scholar, which puts it somewhere in the top 0.01% of political science papers, according to my completely nonscientific personal calculation.
SELECTED LATEST PUBLICATIONS
(for a full list of publications, see here)
(2026) The Effect of Being a Poll Worker on Democratic Attitudes in a Post-Conflict Society: Evidence from an Experiment in Colombia. World Development.
(2026) Does Support for Democracy Increase Losers' Consent? Political Studies
(2026) Renewing Democracy: How Exposure to Electoral Turnovers Reinforces Citizens' Democratic Support. World Politics