I am a Political Science PhD candidate at the University of Zurich (UZH), Switzerland.

My research focuses on political competition, specifically on the use of rhetoric as a tool for parties to attract voters. I am interested in questions such as how populism can be identified in political speech. Under what conditions does populism successfully attract voters, and why? Methodologically, I primarily use machine learning and causal inference to answer these questions.

My PhD is supported by a Swiss National Foundation project on large scale online deliberation.

You can view my CV updated on May 2025 here

Table of Contents

1. Publications
2. Grants
3. Teaching
4. Selected Voluntary Work
5. Education
6. Experience
7. Data and Resources

Publications

Published Papers

• How to measure political polarization in text-as-data? A scoping review of computational social science approaches - Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2024. Full View

Working Papers

• Dynamic Populism Rhetoric Measurement and its impact on vote choice - C.Pereira, Presented at EPSA and APSA, 2024, 2025.
• Gendered Social Norms Detector: Party Effect in Congress Speeches - C.Pereira,C.Marangon, Presented at CIS Zurichberg colloquium 2025.
• Social Norms and Common Good Perceptions - C.Pereira
• Deliberative Transformative Moments: a text approach - C.Pereira
• Online Deliberation of Tempo-30 in Swiss Cities - C. Sarasua, F. Bachmann, D.Weijden,S. Li,C.Pereira, V. Vuk,M. Steenbergen, A.Bernstein
• Pandemic Effects in Nationalism Dimensions - A. Wimmer, P. Singh ,C. Pereira,Z. Fu

Grants

• 5 000 CHF: Funding from UZH for a Courses Program in Bocconi University,2025: Advanced Microeconomics and Game Theory courses
• 8 000 CHF: Funding from CIS (UZH + ETH) for Gender Bias Detector, 2024: working paper with Claudia Marangon (ETH)
• 5 000 CHF: Computational Methods Working Group, 2023 CMWG

Teaching

Graduate Level

• Deep Learning For Social Sciences: Teaching Assistant with Prof. Dr. Marco Steenbergen: 2023 2024 [2025]
• Deep Learning For Text and Vision: Teaching Assistant with Prof. Dr. Marco Steenbergen: ESSEX Summer School 2024 [2025]

Ungraduate Level

• Why people don’t vote? Understanding the void: Seminar Syllabus - BA 2024. Access
• Computational Approach to Deliberation: Co-Teaching with Valeria Vuk; Seminar Syllabus - BA 2023. Access

Supervison

• BA Thesis Supervision 2025: Lea Schubarth

Selected Voluntary Work

• European Network Conference 2024: Organizing Committe. Website

Education

• PhD in Political Science, University of Zurich, 2022 - 2026 Swiss National Foundation Project
• Master’s in International Studies, ISCTE - Portugal, 2020-2022
• Master’s in Biomedical Engineering, University Twente - Netherlands, 2014-2016
• Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering, IST - Portugal, 2012-2014

Experience

• Account Manager, Microsoft - Portugal, 2020-2022
• Assistant Professor of Machine Learning, ISEG - Portugal, 2020-2022
• Data Scientist, Microsoft - EMEA (Spain Based), 2016 - 2020

Data and Resources

Datasets

• Text Dataset: Parliamentary Speeches from 1991-2019 (Countries: Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Germany, France, Italy). Download

Packages

• Populism and Technocracy Classifier: Language-agnostic transformer classifier for populism and technocracy [available upon publication of paper]. Git-Hub