Kenneth Benoit

Kenneth Benoit is a Professor (Part-time) at the School of Politics & International Relations, Australian National University (ANU), and a Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University's Department of Government (1998). His research focuses on computational methods for analyzing political texts and social media, including text mining, big data analysis, and statistical modeling. Substantive research interests include comparative party competition, electoral systems, and the European Parliament. He has contributed to large-scale projects such as estimating policy positions via crowd-sourcing and manifesto coding.

He has supervised research students and developed tools like the 'quanteda' R package for textual analysis. His recent work explores textual complexity in political communication and the effects of campaign spending. Dr. Benoit is involved in a 2023-2026 project examining Australian parliamentary speech, analyzing deliberativeness and representativeness. His work bridges methodological innovation with substantive political questions, emphasizing quantitative and computational approaches.