About
Dr Marta Pagnini is a Research Officer specialising in political behaviour, the sociology of organisations, computational social science, and survey methodology. Her current research focuses on leading survey design, data collection, and quantitative analysis on local government leadership behaviour across over 100 European cities within the City Government Innovation Observatory at LSE Cities.
Her PhD from the LSE examined the social networks and political behaviour of the British royal family between 1870 and 1950. For this project, she transformed raw archival newspaper material into a dataset of 150,000 royal activities to explore how the British monarchy adapted to an increasingly democratising society.
Her other research includes the World Elite Database, an effort to compile a comparative dataset on elite positions across 16 countries, and a social network analysis of the nomination networks of fellows of the British Academy from its inception in the 1900s until the 1940s.
Marta holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Pisa, a BSc in Sociology from the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and an MSc and PhD in Sociology from LSE.