Laurence Cooley is a political scientist whose research investigates the relationship between social identities and political institutions, with a focus on power-sharing institutions and the politics of the census in deeply divided societies. Between 2017 and 2019, Laurence was an ESRC Future Research Leader, and he has been Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham since September 2021. He has also been a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast.