A related strand of Cochrane's current research, with Michael Cowan (PhD student, University of Toronto), focuses on computational redistricting. Together they have developed the Markov Riding Position Sampler (MaRiPoSa), a tool for simulating Canadian elections under alternative configurations of electoral boundaries. The project shows that, for a single Canadian election, there exist alternative boundary configurations—each consistent with existing legal principles—that would return different governments without changing the vote or location of a single voter.

Cochrane was Principal Investigator of LiPaD (Linked Parliamentary Data), a collaboration of political scientists, computer scientists, and historians at the University of Toronto focused on the Canadian Parliamentary Debates, which he continues to develop. The Hansard is a 150-year running record of political history, but its sheer volume makes it difficult to use for research. With support from the SSHRC, the NSERC, the Digging into Data initiative, and partnerships with the Library of Parliament, Library and Archives Canada, Canadiana.org, and openparliament.ca, the team produced a machine-readable and fully searchable historical Hansard. The project was led in collaboration with Graeme Hirst (Computer Science, University of Toronto), the senior scholar on the project, and included Tanya Whyte (PhD candidate, Political Science), Kasper Beelen (Postdoctoral Fellow), Ludovic Rheault (Postdoctoral Fellow), Nona Naderi (PhD student, Computer Science), and a large team of students. These data now underpin [a publicly accessible search interface](https://www.lipad.ca/) and continue to expand to include the Debates of the Senate, transcripts of parliamentary committees, and linked biographical and constituency-level information about parliamentarians.

Cochrane is author of Left and Right: The Small World of Political Ideas (McGill-Queen's University Press), which traces the origins of political language to the nature of ideology itself. The book analyzes the structure and evolution of the left-right divide in twenty-one Western democracies since 1945. Cochrane has co-authored articles on word embeddings for ideological scaling and on the automated analysis of emotion in political speech, which have appeared in journals including Political Communication and Political Analysis.

Cochrane has supervised 13 PhD dissertations, 5 postdoctoral fellows, 6 Master's students, and over 30 undergraduate research projects. He is recipient of the UTSC Senior Faculty Teaching Award.