I am an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. Previously, I was a Senior Researcher at the University of Zurich.
My research focuses on political representation, party competition, political communication, public opinion, quantitative text analysis, and the application of computer vision techniques. My work has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Communication, the European Journal of Political Research, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others.
I am a founding member of the Connected_Politics Lab, a non-resident fellow at the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich, a member of the UCD Energy Institute, co-author of the quanteda R package, and maintainer of the Irish Polling Indicator.
2022.
“The Temporal Focus of Campaign Communication.” The Journal of Politics 84(1): 585–590.
– Best Paper Award, Manifesto Corpus Conference (2018)
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[Data and Code]
2022.
“Social Media and Political Agenda Setting.” Political Communication 39(1): 39–60 (with Fabrizio Gilardi, Theresa Gessler, and Maël Kubli).
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2022.
“Voter Expectations of Government Formation in Coalition Systems: The Importance of the Information Context.” European Journal of Political Research 61(1): 111–133 (with Shaun Bowler and Gail McElroy).
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2022.
“Building Research Infrastructures to Study Digital Technology and Politics: Lessons from Switzerland.” PS: Political Science & Politics 55(2): 354–359 (with Fabrizio Gilardi, Lucien Baumgartner, Clau Dermont, Karsten Donnay, Theresa Gessler, Maël Kubli, and Lucas Leemann).
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2021.
“Gender, Candidate Emotional Expression, and Voter Reactions During Televised Debates.” American Political Science Review 115(4): 1242–1257 (with Constantine Boussalis, Travis G. Coan, and Mirya R. Holman).
– Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year Award, APSA Political Communication Section (2022)
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[Data and Code]
2021.
“Issue Ownership and Agenda Setting in the 2019 Swiss National Elections.” Swiss Political Science Review online first (with Fabrizio Gilardi, Theresa Gessler, and Maël Kubli).
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2021.
“Evidence for the Irrelevance of Irrelevant Events.” Political Science Research and Methods online first (with Liam Kneafsey).
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2021.
“Are Irish Voters Moving to the Left?” Irish Political Studies 36(4): 535–555 (with Aidan Regan).
– Best Paper Award, PSAI Annual Conference (Elizabeth Meehan Prize, 2021)
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[Data and Code]
2021.
“The Incumbency Advantage in Second-Order PR Elections: Evidence from the Irish Context, 1942–2019.” Electoral Studies 71: 102331 (with Michael Jankowski).
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2021.
“Social Media and Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Switzerland.” Swiss Political Science Review 27(2): 243–256 (with Fabrizio Gilardi, Theresa Gessler, and Maël Kubli).
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2020.
“Media Coverage of Campaign Promises Throughout the Electoral Cycle.” Political Communication 37(5): 696–718.
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2020.
“The Electoral Cycle Effect in Parliamentary Democracies.” Political Science Research and Methods 8(4): 795–802 (with Tom Louwerse).
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2020.
“Campaigns and the Selection of Policy-Seeking Representatives.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 45(3): 397–431 (with Shaun Bowler and Gail McElroy).
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2019.
“Do Voters Really Prefer More Choice? Determinants of Support for Personalised Electoral Systems.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 29(2): 262–281 (with Michael Jankowski).
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2018.
“quanteda: An R Package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data.” Journal of Open Source Software 3(30): 774 (with Kenneth Benoit, Kohei Watanabe, Haiyan Wang, Paul Nulty, Adam Obeng, and Akitaka Matsuo).
– Winner of the Society for Political Methodology Statistical Software Award (2020)
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[Software Repository]
2018.
“Voter Preferences and Party Loyalty under Cumulative Voting: Political Behaviour after Electoral Reform in Bremen and Hamburg.” Electoral Studies 51: 93–102 (with Shaun Bowler and Gail McElroy).
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2018.
“Assessing the Influence of Neutral Grounds on Match Outcomes.” International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport 18(6): 892–905 (with Liam Kneafsey).
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2022. Quanteda Tutorials (with Kohei Watanabe). https://tutorials.quanteda.io.
The Politics of Nostalgia in Europe (with Sven-Oliver Proksch).
Discourse Wars and ‘Mask Diplomacy’: China’s Global Image Management in Times of Crisis (with
Samuel Brazys and
Alexander Dukalskis).
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Citizen Reactions to Experts in Deliberative Assemblies (with Killian Daly, Garrett Kennedy, and Tomás Maher).
Leader of the Pack? Changes in ‘Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’ After a Politburo Collective Study Session (with Samuel Brazys and Alexander Dukalskis).
Issue Emphasis in Candidates’ Campaign Communication as a Signal of Legislative Priorities (with Naofumi Fujimura).
Campaigning by Tweet: Evidence from Ireland (with James P Cross, Derek Greene, and Martijn Schoonvelde).
Journal Impact Factor and Characteristics of Peer Review Reports: A Supervised Machine Learning Study (with Anna Severin, Michaela Strinzl, and Matthias Egger).
If you would like to get access to the latest version of a paper, feel free to send me an e-mail.
Parties and Party Competition (University College Dublin: Spring 2020, Autumn 2021).
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Representation and Party Competition (University of Zurich: Autumn 2019, Spring 2020).
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Introduction to Statistics (University College Dublin: Autumn 2020, Autumn 2021).
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Quantitative Text Analysis (University of Zurich: Autumn 2019, Spring 2020; University College Dublin: Spring 2022).
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Connected_Politics (University College Dublin; Spring 2021, Spring 2022).
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Political Representation and Policy Preferences (University of Zurich: Autumn 2019, Spring 2020).
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Quantitative Text Analysis for Beginners: University of Lucerne (2021); University of Hamburg (2021); Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (2020); University of Bremen (2020, 2018); COMPTEXT (2019: Tokyo, 2020: Innsbruck); Swiss National Science Foundation (2019); Kobe University (2019); University of Düsseldorf (2019); University of Bergen (2019); Trinity College Dublin (2018); WZB Berlin (2018)
Creating Academic Personal Websites: Geneva Graduate Institute (2022); University of Lucerne (2022); University College Dublin (2020)
Data Wrangling and Visualisation: University College Dublin (2020); Trinity College Dublin (2017)
Reproducible Research with Git and GitHub: University College Dublin (2021)
I could also teach these workshops at your institution. Do not hesitate to contact me.
The Irish Polling Indicator is a joint project with Tom Louwerse. We combine all opinion polls for the Dáil Éireann into daily estimates of public support for Irish parties. We released a new Irish Polling Indicator website and provide datasets containing results from over 640 polls since 1983 and daily aggregated estimates from 1987 to 2022.
UCD Expertise featured the Polling Indicator and related research.
The figure below (updated automatically after the release of new polls) reports the most recent estimates of party support.
The Irish Demographic Polling Datasets collect aggregated results on vote intentions, satisfaction with the government, and popularity of party leaders. The data are available for all respondents and various subsamples, such as age groups, gender, social class, geographic region, and district magnitude. Currently, the datasets consider over 100 polls, published between 2011 and 2022. The data were collected in collaboration with Thomas Pluck.