Welcome to my website!
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia and was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University in 2018-19. My main research interests are in public opinion, voting behavior and voter turnout in advanced industrialized democracies, with a particular focus on how we can counter recent trends of citizen political alienation and improve the quality of civic engagement. In my research I primarily use experiments and quasi-experiments. In two of my projects, I am analyzing the effect of electoral reforms on inequalities in political participation and election outcomes. In other work, I am studying populist radical right voting, with one project specifically focusing on how the increasing rental (over)burden may fuel populist radical right support and with another project experimentally testing the responsiveness of populist radical right voters to socioeconomic policy and competence messages. Finally, my collaborative work with Christopher Kam and Anthony Bertelli provides a new perspective on the relationship between the electoral system, the party system, and electoral accountability. My research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Electoral Studies and Research and Politics.
Contact
Department of Political Science
Trinity College Dublin
3 College Green
Dublin 2
Ireland
Email: helda@tcd.ie