Research

Last updated 09/07/2025

I’m lucky enough to do research for living, currently as a data scientist and previously as a PhD student in political science. I still try to publish in political science when my spare time allows. This page lists my published research and working papers, with work conducted across the fields of political science, data science, and artificial intelligence. “Published” here means a mix of peer-reviewed journal articles, technical reports, and research reports. This page is usually the most up to date list of my research, but you can also visit my google scholar profile.

Publications

Closed-Domain Event Extraction: Literature Review

Swatton, P., Hickey, A., Knight, J. and Bishop, J. (2025)

PDF

Selective Forgetting in LLMs

Dymond, J., Swatton, P., Roberts, J. and Bishop, J. (2024)

PDF GitHub

AI-Enabled Influence Operations: Safeguarding Future Elections

Stockwell, S., Hughes, M., Swatton, P., Zhang, A., Hall KC, J., and Kieran (2024)

Link PDF

Low-Cost Model Selection for Transformers (LoCoMoSeT)

Dable-Heath, E., Swatton, P., Roberts, J., and Bishop, J (2024)

PDF GitHub

AI-Enabled Influence Operations: The Threat to the UK General Election

Stockwell, S., Hughes, M., Swatton, P., and Bishop, K. (2024)

Link PDF

Agree to Agree: Correcting Acquiescence Bias in the Case of Fully Unbalanced Scales with Application to UK Measurements of Political Beliefs

Swatton, P. (2024)

DOI GitHub

Model Similarity Phase 2: Dataset Similarity

Swatton, P., Knight, J. and Bishop, J. (2023)

PDF GitHub

Social Democratic Party Positions on the EU: The Case of Brexit

Swatton, P.J. (2023)

DOI GitHub

Preprints

Applying Psychometrics to Large Language Model Simulated Populations: Recreating the HEXACO Personality Inventory Experiment with Generative Agents

Mercer, S., Martin, D.P. and Swatton, P. (2025)

DOI PDF

Working Papers

Age Isn't Just a Number: A Comparative Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Political Beliefs in Europe

Swatton, P.J. (2021)

PDF

The effect of Vocational Training on Voter Choice in the Case of Germany

Swatton, P.J. and Wagner, S. (2021)

PDF

How Parties Die? Political Parties Change and Mortality in Western Democracies

Kuraishi, A., Swatton, P.J., and Zur, R.

PhD Thesis

My PhD thesis is titled Three Essays on the Measurement of Political Ideology. It has three component papers, along with an introduction and conclusion which I’m particularly proud of (typos aside):

  1. Agree to Agree: Correcting Acquiescence Bias in the Case of Fully Unbalanced Scales with Application to UK Measurements of Political Beliefs
  2. Age Isn’t Just a Number: A Comparative Age-Period-Cohort Analysis of Political Beliefs in Europe
  3. Social Democratic Party Positions on the EU: The Case of Brexit
Link PDF