Elias  Dinas is Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Nottingham. He teaches quantitative methods and comparative politics and his research interests include the dynamics of political socialisation, political psychology and political methodology. From 2010 to 2012 he was a post-doctoral Prize research fellow in Nuffield college at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in political science from the European University Institute (2010). During his PhD studies, he spent one term in the department of Political Science, UC Berkeley, as a visiting Research Fellow. Currently, he works on various research projects. Some of these projects examine the formation of political attitudes whereas others focus on the electoral side-effects of political institutions. From a research design point of view, most of his current and previous work is characterised by the often futile effort to come up against his personal interests. In some of his projects he is better than in others.