Laura Chaqués Bonafont is Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona, and research fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). She is leading the research group “Quality of Democracy” (www.q-dem.com) aimed to analyze the interrelation between the governmental, parliamentarian and media agendas across time, issues, countries and levels of government in Spain in a comparative perspective.

The project establishes a link between policy dynamics research and other areas of concern within political science, mainly media studies, political representation and the quality of democracy in multilevel systems of governance. It also provides new tools for the development of quantitative measurement of policy dynamics. Her last book is Agenda Dynamics in Spain (Palgrave 2015 with Frank Baumgartner and A. Palau).

Her work also appears in top academic journals like Comparative Political Studies, The British Journal of Political Science, West European Politics, Political Communication, or the Journal of Public Policy among others.

At present her main research interests are the analysis of agenda dynamics in a comparative perspective paying especial attention to the role of the media, and interest groups, and (2) the analysis of the quality of democracy in multilevel systems of governance. To do that, she collaborates actively with the Comparative Agendas Project (www.comparativeagendas.net), aimed to provide new tools for the quantitative analysis of agenda dynamics across time, countries, policy issues and levels of governance, and the Comparative Interest Group Survey (www.cigsurvey.eu). In 2014 she won the ICREA prize.