Susana Salgado

Susana Salgado is a Research Professor at the University of Lisbon's Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS-ULisboa), specializing in political communication, populism, and digital media. She previously held positions at the University of Oxford and Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her research spans comparative analyses of media systems, disinformation, and democratization processes across Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Her core research explores:

• Populist rhetoric in election campaigns
• Online incivility and hate speech dynamics
• Cross-national disinformation patterns
• Citizen journalism evolution in digital ecosystems
• Media's role in Lusophone African democratization

Her publications (2018–2025) reveal consistent focus on digital political communication, with trends toward cross-cultural comparisons of online behavior, platform-specific discourse analysis, and the intersection of crisis narratives with populism. Methodologies blend computational analysis with qualitative framing techniques across diverse geopolitical contexts.

She leads major projects including:

• Streams of hate and untruth? (PTDC/CPO-CPO/28495/2017)
• Politics, Policy, Populism and Online/Social Media (IF/01451/2014/CP1239/CT0004)
• The Ethnic Heritage of Party Politics in Lusophone Africa

She coordinates the SPARC research group (Social and Political Attitudes: Resilience and Change) and collaborates on international networks analyzing media and populism.