Constantine Boussalis

About

I am Associate Professor in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and a Fellow of the College. My work sits between political communication, environmental politics, and computational social science. In practice, this means working with text, images, audio, and video as data, and lately with large language models, to study public debate about climate change, the ways politicians communicate without words, and the appeal of extremist politics.

My research has appeared in journals including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Communication, and Global Environmental Change, and one of these papers received the Walter Lippmann Award of the American Political Science Association's Political Communication Section in 2022. I currently lead the Trinity team on What-if, a Horizon Europe project on the information environment and democracy. Before coming to Trinity in 2014, I was an Empirical Research Fellow at Harvard Law School, and I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Claremont Graduate University.

Research

My research uses computational methods to study political communication. Much of it is about climate change, and in particular about the organised effort to cast doubt on climate science. With co-authors, I have studied the arguments of conservative think tanks, built a classifier for contrarian claims and the reasoning behind them, and more recently used large language models to follow contrarian speech in the United States Congress. A second part of my work treats images and video as data: how candidates' facial expressions in televised debates shape voter impressions, for example, or how members of Congress present themselves in their social media images. A third part is about political extremism, from far-right communities on Telegram and the propaganda of autocratic regimes to the electoral consequences of political violence in Greece. I also work on diplomatic correspondence and what it reveals about how states see one another and about the onset of international crises.

Publications

1. 2026 Rori, L., Roumanias, C., & Boussalis, C. (2026).Democracy in the crossfire: The electoral fallout of extremist political violence.Electoral Studies, 104, 103171.
2. 2026 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Holman, M. R. (2026).Happiness in political communication by men and women members of the US Congress.Political Communication.
3. 2026 Flack, R., Cook, J., Ellerton, P., Kinkead, D., Coan, T. G., Boussalis, C., et al. (2026).Identifying flawed reasoning in contrarian claims about climate change.Environmental Communication, 1–22.
4. 2026 Coan, T. G., Malla, R., Nanko, M. O., Kattrup, W., Roberts, J. T., Cook, J., & Boussalis, C. (2026).Large language model reveals an increase in climate contrarian speech in the United States Congress.Communications Sustainability, 1(1), 37.
5. 2025 Boussalis, C., Craig, C., & Rudkin, A. F. (2025).Collective victimhood narratives in far-right communities on Telegram.Information, Communication & Society, 28(8), 1407–1424.
6. 2024 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Holman, M. R. (2024).Rally 'round the mask: Congressional social media images and masking during COVID-19.The Journal of Politics, 86(4), 1591–1596.
7. 2023 Guhin, J., Holman, M. R., Coan, T. G., & Boussalis, C. (2023).When to preach about poverty: How location, race, and ideology shape white evangelical sermons.Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 62(2), 312–335.
8. 2023 Boussalis, C., Dukalskis, A., & Gerschewski, J. (2023).Why it matters what autocrats say: Assessing competing theories of propaganda.Problems of Post-Communism, 70(3), 241–252.
9. 2022 Boussalis, C., Chadefaux, T., Decadri, S., & Salvi, A. (2022).Public and private information in international crises: Diplomatic correspondence and conflict anticipation.International Studies Quarterly, 66(4), sqac056.
10. 2021 Coan, T. G., Boussalis, C., Cook, J., & Nanko, M. O. (2021).Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change.Scientific Reports, 11(1), 22320.Coverage and impact
11. 2021 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., Holman, M. R., & Müller, S. (2021).Gender, candidate emotional expression, and voter reactions during televised debates.American Political Science Review, 115(4), 1242–1257.Coverage and impact
12. 2021 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Holman, M. R. (2021).Political speech in religious sermons.Politics and Religion, 14(2), 241–268.
13. 2021 Boussalis, C., & Coan, T. G. (2021).Facing the electorate: Computational approaches to the study of nonverbal communication and voter impression formation.Political Communication, 38(1-2), 75–97.
14. 2020 Decadri, S., & Boussalis, C. (2020).Populism, party membership, and language complexity in the Italian Chamber of Deputies.Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 30(4), 484–503.
15. 2020 Devaney, L., Brereton, P., Torney, D., Coleman, M., Boussalis, C., & Coan, T. G. (2020).Environmental literacy and deliberative democracy: A content analysis of written submissions to the Irish Citizens' Assembly on climate change.Climatic Change, 162(4), 1965–1984.Coverage and impact
16. 2019 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Holman, M. R. (2019).Communicating climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in American cities.Climate, 7(3), 45.
17. 2018 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Holman, M. R. (2018).Climate change communication from cities in the USA.Climatic Change, 149(2), 173–187.
18. 2018 Boussalis, C., Feldman, Y., & Smith, H. E. (2018).Experimental analysis of the effect of standards on compliance and performance.Regulation & Governance, 12(2), 277–298.
19. 2018 Alvarez, L., Boussalis, C., Merolla, J. L., & Peiffer, C. A. (2018).Love thy neighbour: Social identity and public support for humanitarian aid.Development Policy Review, 36(S2).
20. 2017 Boussalis, C., & Coan, T. G. (2017).Elite polarization and correcting misinformation in the 'post-truth era'.Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 405–408.
21. 2016 Boussalis, C., Coan, T. G., & Poberezhskaya, M. (2016).Measuring and modeling Russian newspaper coverage of climate change.Global Environmental Change, 41, 99–110.
22. 2016 Boussalis, C., & Coan, T. G. (2016).Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt.Global Environmental Change, 36, 89–100.Coverage and impact
23. 2012 Boussalis, C., Nelson, H. T., & Swaminathan, S. (2012).Towards comprehensive malaria planning: The effect of government capacity, health policy, and land use variables on malaria incidence in India.Social Science & Medicine, 75(7), 1213–1221.
24. 2011 Boussalis, C., & Peiffer, C. (2011).Health, need and politics: The determinants of bilateral HIV/AIDS assistance.Journal of Development Studies, 47(12), 1798–1825.
25. 2010 Peiffer, C. A., & Boussalis, C. (2010).Foreign assistance and the struggle against HIV/AIDS in the developing world.Journal of Development Studies, 46(3), 556–573.

Book chapters

1. 2015 Peiffer, C., & Boussalis, C. (2015).Determining aid allocation decision-making: Towards a comparative sectored approach.In B. Mak Arvin & Byron Lew (Eds.), Handbook on the Economics of Foreign Aid (pp. 45–63). Edward Elgar.
2. 2015 Boussalis, C., Merolla, J., & Peiffer, C. (2015).Identity and public support for North American integration.In Achim Hurrelmann & Steffen Schneider (Eds.), The Legitimacy of Regional Integration in Europe and the Americas (pp. 98–116). Palgrave Macmillan.
3. 2012 Kugler, T., Boussalis, C., & Coan, T. G. (2012).Political performance as a moderator of international migration.In Jacek Kugler & Ronald L. Tammen (Eds.), The Performance of Nations (pp. 119–144). Rowman & Littlefield.
4. 2012 Kugler, T., Coan, T. G., & Boussalis, C. (2012).Provincial politics and the attraction of FDI in India and China.In Jacek Kugler & Ronald L. Tammen (Eds.), The Performance of Nations (pp. 211–228). Rowman & Littlefield.

Teaching

At Trinity I teach research methods and computational social science at undergraduate and graduate levels. My undergraduate modules have included Research Methods for Political Science, Contemporary International Relations, and the final-year Capstone; at graduate level I have taught Quantitative Text Analysis, Research Design, Political Illiberalism, International Politics, Global Environmental Politics, and International Development. I was the founding Course Director of the MSc in Applied Social Data Science from 2021 to 2024, and I have taught image analysis at the Q-Step and NCRM Spring School at the University of Exeter.

I have supervised six doctoral students, five of whom have completed: Silvia Decadri (University of Brescia), David Moore (Department of Foreign Affairs, Ireland), Lucas da Silva (University of Zurich), Cassandra Craig (Dublin City University), and Marina Schenkel (Trinity College Dublin and TU Dublin). Elena Karagianni's dissertation is in progress.

CV

The full curriculum vitae is available as a PDF (updated October 2026). The main entries are below; awards, grants, and invited talks open as notes.

Positions

• 2024 to dateHead of Discipline, Political Science, Trinity College Dublin
• 2020 to dateAssociate Professor in Political Science, Trinity College Dublin
• 2014 to 2020Assistant Professor in Political Science, Trinity College Dublin
• 2011 to 2014Empirical Research Fellow, Harvard Law School
• 2010 to 2011Lecturer, Loyola Marymount University

Education

• 2011Ph.D. in Political Science, Claremont Graduate University
• 2007M.A. in International Studies, Claremont Graduate University
• 2005B.A. in Political Science, cum laude, California State University, Los Angeles

Contact

• Google Scholar
• ORCID 0000-0002-0609-6272
• GitHub
• X (@cboussalis)
• Trinity College Dublin profile