I’m Yen-Chieh (David) Liao. I am a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin in NexSys, a cross-disciplinary project funded by the Science Foundation Ireland. I am a member of the Text and Policy Research Group, led by Dr. Stefan Müller, and the Connected_Politics Lab.
I obtained my PhD in January 2023 from the Department of Government at the University of Essex. In my final year, I also served as a predoctoral fellow with Prof. Thomas Saalfeld at the University of Bamberg, Germany, working on the Legislators between Accountability and Collective Agency project. Before joining UCD, I had a brief postdoctoral stint at Global Studies in Aarhus University.
My research primarily focuses on legislative studies, party competition, electoral systems, Taiwan politics, and particularly within the context of East Asian politics. I’m particularly interested in measuring ideological preferences through legislative voting, expert surveys, and analysis of parliamentary speeches and politial texts. My recent work involves quantitative text analysis and computational methods to understand political narratives of political elites and their impact on public attitudes and expectations in the future.