Ligita Šarkutė is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy, Department of Public Administration, Kaunas, Lithuania. She also holds position of senior research fellow. In 2022 L. Šarkutė started to work as an adviser in the Research Unit of the Office of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania.
Her research interests encompass a wide array of topics, including public policy decision-making, the dynamic interplay between interest groups and political parties, the evaluation of democracy’s quality, political communication strategies, subjective well-being assessment within political contexts, political participation dynamics, citizen engagement and inclusivity, analysis of election manifestos issued by political parties, as well as automatic authorship attribution and profiling of political texts. As a professor, Šarkutė has played pivotal roles in major cross-national initiatives such as the European Social Survey (ESS), European Election Study (EES), and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). She has also spearheaded national projects exploring the relationship between interest groups and political parties, funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. Additionally, she has contributed to interdisciplinary scientific endeavors focused on testing and analyzing human language technologies, particularly in the realms of automatic authorship attribution and profiling.
With extensive experience in comparative survey research, Šarkutė has been an integral member of the ESS Lithuanian team since 2012. Prior to that, she served on the ISSP Lithuanian team from 2010 to 2020 and was also involved with the EES (PIREDEU) in 2009. Her contributions to these endeavors have primarily involved the design and adaptation of survey questionnaires, and she has consistently utilized comparative survey data in her scholarly publications.
Academic Profile by:Filipos RUXHO
Assistant Professor of Economics and Sustainable Development