Jesús Benítez Baleato

I am a Political Scientist (International PhD, Cum Laude), with a background on Informatics. I am interested in understanding the causes and the effects of digital technologies so they can be used to improve democracy. With that purpose, I apply computational methods to empirically test hypothesis grounded on political theory.

I have made my research available through peer-reviewed outlets, such as Science. I use public scientific repositories to enable reproduction of published results, and to facilitate the re-use of my data and methods by other scholars. I have developed my scientific capacity mainly through international collaboration in research projects hosted at excellence research centers including the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University (USA), the Communication, Networks and Contention research group at the University of Konstanz in Germany, the Swiss Federal Technology Institute (ETH Zürich), the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California San Diego Supercomputer (USA), or Cybersecurity Capacity Center at Oxford University (UK).

I teach courses at the BA, MA and PhD levels at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where I also contribute as a member of the Political Analysis research group leading the research line on Political Technology. In addition to the academic realm, I have contributed to digital policy implementation fostering free software and open standards at the governmental level, and taking part in the global policy-making process with an emphasis on data protection, artificial intelligence and cyber-security, in the context of the OECD and the G7/ G20 dialogue. I am Galician.