Dr. Rory Costello

Research Interests

My research interests include EU politics, political representation, electoral behaviour, voter engagement and coalition government.

Current projects include:

• Representation beyond political parties. This project, funded by the Irish Research Council, examines the consequences of the decline of political parties for the quality of representation, focusing on the 2016 Irish general election.

• The voting advice application WhichCandidate. This is an online tool designed to provide information to voters while at the same time collecting valuable data on the policy preferences of election candidates and their constituents. It was run on a nationwide basis for the 2015 General Election, in partnership with The Irish Times and a number of local media outlets, and used by over 100,000 voters during the election.

• Research into online political gambling markets and their use as measures of election campaign volatility and election forecasting (What are the Odds). With Matthew Wall and Stephen Lindsay of Swansea University.

• Analysis of election pledge fulfillment by political parties and the factors influencing pledge fulfillment, both in Ireland and cross-nationally. This research is carried out in collaboration with an international research network, the Comparative Party Pledge group. The first comparative publication from this project can be found here.