About
Lanabi La Lova is an Advanced Quantitative Fellow in the Department of Methodology and a Guest Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. A computational political scientist, she specialises in text-as-data and quantitative approaches to political science, with a focus on political communication, propaganda, and media systems. Her research interests include Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans, as well as broader themes of authoritarian politics and democratic backsliding.
She completed her PhD in International Relations at LSE, where her dissertation examined how news media in Putin’s Russia sustain regime survival. Before her current post, she was a Research Officer at the European Institute on the ERC-funded project JUSTINT. She has also worked on transitional justice, gender and parliamentary politics, and comparative authoritarianism, applying data science methods such as natural language processing, web scraping, and advanced statistical analysis. With a background in economics, statistics, and professional experience in financial consultancy outside academia, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of political regimes and their communication strategies.
Publications
Lanabi La Lova. "Text-as-Data Methods to Study Mass-Media Manipulations in Autocracies." Communist and Post-Communist Studies, August 5, 2025, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2025.2638313
La Lova, Lanabi, Denisa Kostovicova, and Timothy William Waters. 2025. "Enemy of Justice? Secrecy in Domestic War Crimes Trials in Serbia." Journal of Genocide Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2025.2545083
Sokolić, Ivor, Denisa Kostovicova, Lanabi La Lova, and Sanja Vico. 2025. "Are Domestic War Crimes Trials Biased?" Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433241292143
La Lova, Lanabi. 2024. "Vladimir Putin on Channel One, 2000–2022." Political Communication 42 (2): 234–52. doi:10.1080/10584609.2024.2380438.
Kostovicova, Denisa, Ivor Sokolić, and Lanabi La Lova. 2024. Legislative Debates and Transitional Justice in the Western Balkans. Berlin: Aspen Institute Deutschland
Kostovicova, Denisa, and Lanabi La Lova. 2024. "Grandstanding Instead of Deliberative Policy-Making: Transitional Justice, Publicness and Parliamentary Questions in the Croatian Parliament." Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 18 (5): 598–619. doi:10.1080/17502977.2024.2362001.
La Lova, Lanabi. 2022. "Methods in Russian Studies: Overview of Top Political Science, Economics, and Area Studies Journals." Post-Soviet Affairs 39 (1–2): 27–37. doi:10.1080/1060586X.2022.2162293.
La Lova, Lanabi. 2021. "Protests in Russia Raise Questions about the Role of New Media in Democratisation." LSE Media Blog, February 3, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/02/03/protests-in-russia-raise-questions-about-the-role-of-new-media-in-democratisation/
Expertise
Text-as-data, data science, quantitative approaches to political science, political communication, autocracies, democratic backsliding