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Staff Profile

Dr Brian Boyle

Lecturer in Comparative Politics

Background

My main research interests are political behaviour, comparative politics and political communication, with a focus on quantitative methods and computational social science approaches.


I received my PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde in 2021. My current research examines political campaigning on Twitter during European Parliament elections, as well as political representation in UK public broadcasting. My other published work based on my PhD research explores the relationship between electoral rules such as compulsory voting and voter registration, and social inequalities across voting, non-electoral participation, and political attitudes.


Research

Current research projects I am involved in include:


Electoral Rules and Political Engagement

  • Explores the relationship between structural aspects of political systems (compulsory voting, proportional representation, voter registration, referendums), and how citizens participate and engage with political affairs
  • How these factors relate to age, educational, and income based inequalities in political participation and attitudes


BBC Question Time Data Project

  • Data collection on guest appearances across all episodes of BBC Question Time (1979-2019).
  • Created using a combination of web-scraping and manual coding.
  • Explores descriptive and substantive representation in public broadcasting
  • Looks at differences across gender, ethnicity, and educational background, as well as how parties and issues are represented on the programme


Pro-con EU

  • Research project across 4 partner universities which examines the supporters and opponents of the EU.
  • Our work package explores Twitter campaigning during the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections
  • Dataset containing over 16 million tweets, with 100,000 tweets coded in over 10 languages
  • Using semi-supervised machine learning and multi-lingual classification


Next Generation Energy Systems (NexSys)

  • Multidisciplinary research programme aimed at developing evidence-based pathways for a net zero energy system in Ireland.
  • Project examining how academic research on climate science and net-zero engages with policymaking debates
  • Uses the Scopus dataset, analysing over 500,000 journal abstracts with machine learning and quantitative text analysis approaches



Teaching

I am currently module leader for the following classes:

  • Becoming a Political Researcher (POL2017) 2nd year undergraduate research design module
  • Principles of Data Science for Political Research (POL8065) MA data analysis module


And have taught previously on the following modules:

  • Applied Data Science for Political Research (POL3055) 3rd year undergraduate quantitative methods module
  • Thinking About Politics (POL8041) MA politics module


I have previous experience as a Teaching Assistant across a variety of modules:

  • Research design
  • Quantitative methods
  • Comparative politics
  • International relations
  • Introduction to politics


Publications