Jesse joined the Department of European & International Studies as a PhD candidate in September 2023, interested in the intersection of homosexuality and nativism and how both public opinion and party appeals combine nativist attitudes with sexual-liberal positions, as well as how these ideological configurations compare across European nations.

He is a recipient of the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS-DTP) studentship in Politics, Public Policy & Governance, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He holds a BA in Political Studies from Queen Mary, University of London (2019 – 2022) and an MA in Human Rights Research (Law and Political Science) from the University of Manchester (2022-2023).

Entering education later in life, Jesse spent most of his early years working in business management for large international companies before developing an interest in politics and deciding to enter education. Whilst completing his studies, Jesse has held several positions, such as parliamentary researcher for the UK Parliament, and data analyst for the Icelandic Constitutional Archives, as well as working on EU Horizon Project’s coding and analysing data relating to gender attitudes across political parties.

Research interests

• Comparative Politics
• Mixed-Methods
• Nationalism and Nativism
• Sexuality Politics
• British and European Politics
• European Union Politics
• Masculinity Studies

Teaching

• 4AAOB101: British Politics
• 5AAOB201: The Integration of the European Union

Office hours

Contact via e-mail to book an appointment

PhD research

Sexuality and immigration have become increasingly prominent issues across Europe, not just across the political agenda, but also within the attitude formations of the population. My research investigates the different ways these issues are handled from both political parties and public opinion, by analysing how progressively liberal positions on homosexuality are fused with nativist values.

Conceptualizing the phenomenon as a homosexuality-inclusive nativism (homonativism), the project takes a multiphase mixed-methods approach to identify, contextualize, and compare homonativism in order to uncover the extent of its emergence across right-wing political parties, as well as through the attitudinal configurations of the electorate. Qualitative methods are used to conduct top-down tests through content analyses of right-wing party manifestos across EU/EEA states to identify where homonativism develops and track the phenomenon across time and place. Quantitative bottom-up tests are then conducted, using ESS public opinion data, to first configure a homonativist attitudinal variable before performing longitudinal analyses to reveal what proportion of the national electorates hold homonativist attitudes, before then running regression models to investigate who is more likely to hold these attitudes. Finally, three countries will be selected for exploratory case study, using process tracing to investigate how homonativism developed and integrating interview findings from NGO representatives to further explore the national context.

Through this research, I aim to gain insight into the ideological shift of the European right-wing, as well as uncover how top-down/bottom-up cues drive homonativism and influence the ways in which issues of sexuality and immigration are handled.

PhD supervisors

Dr Isabelle Hertner and Dr Russell Foster

Latest publications

Grainger, J. (2024) Why Israeli-palestinian tensions in the UK matter for ReformUK, Europinion. Available at: https://www.europinion.uk/post/why-israeli-palestinian-tensions-in-the-uk-matter-for-reformuk

Grainger, J. (2024) An emerging homo-nativist electorate?, British Politics and Policy at LSE. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/an-emerging-homo-nativist-electorate/

Grainger, J. (2024) ‘Coming In: Sexual Politics and EU Accession in Serbia - Koen Slootmaeckers’, Europe-Asia Studies, 76(5), pp. 813–814. doi:10.1080/09668136.2024.2339737