Nuffield DPhil Student awarded 2025 DPIR thesis prize
Benedetta Giocoli, a first-year DPhil student in Politics at Nuffield College, is among the four awardees to receive the Department of Politics & International Relations' latest MPhil thesis prize for 2024-25 for getting the highest thesis mark in their cohort
Her thesis, ‘Determinants and Mechanisms of Pre-Adult Political Socialisation Within the Family: Evidence from Britain’, was completed as part of an MPhil Politics in Comparative Government at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
Benedetta Giocoli said:
“I am honoured to receive the MPhil thesis prize in Comparative Government. I am especially grateful to Professor James Tilley, who has been an incredibly generous supervisor over the past two years. Without his guidance and mentorship, this research would not have been possible.
“My thesis examined political socialisation within the family, focusing on the ways in which parents influence their children’s political attitudes. Understanding how this process works is very important because attitudes developed before adulthood tend to shape political behaviour later in life. I find that parents influence children’s political development mainly by communicating their political preferences directly, rather than relying on children observing and imitating these preferences on their own.
“I look forward to expanding this project during my DPhil. I hope to delve deeper into the psychological mechanisms of parents’ political influence and expand my focus to other venues of political socialisation, such as neighbourhoods and schools.”
Benedetta's current research examines the process of attitude formation through political socialisation, focusing on the family, local, and political contexts. More broadly, she is interested in questions about voting behaviour, attitude and preference formation, inequality, political trust, and radical right parties.