C-SoDA Conference – New Faces in Political Methodology IX

New Faces in Political Methodology IX was held on Saturday, April 29, 2017, and featured:

Sarah Bouchat (University of Wisconsin)

"Careers & Causes in Authoritarian Legislatures: Clustering Text-Based Elicited Priors."

2017 Bio: Sarah Bouchat is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with research interests in political methodology, comparative political economy, and authoritarian politics with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Sarah's current work focuses on elicited priors, as well as machine learning and Bayesian statistical applications for the study of low information, authoritarian regimes like Myanmar.

Sarah completed the PhD in Political Science in 2017 and is currently Weinberg College Fellow and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

Andreu Casas (University of Washington)

"Computer Vision for Political Science Research: A Study of Online Protest Images." (coauthored with Nora Webb Williams.) This paper was published == as "Images that Matter: Online Protests and the Mobilizing Role of Pictures." == in Political Research Quarterly (2018).

2017 Bio: Andreu Casas is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Andreu's research interests encompass the areas of political communication, comparative public policy, and computational social sciences. He is particularly interested in how social movements and interest groups influence the political agenda and the decision making process in the current media environment. His methodological interests and strengths are causal inference, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning and artificial intelligence in general. In his dissertation he uses computer vision methods to study under which circumstances online visual communications help advocacy groups get their message across. He also works on an NSF-funded big data project studying how the content of bills evolve as they move through the legislative process. His work has appeared in American Politics Research, Annual Review of Political Science, and Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológica.

Andreu received his Ph.D. in 2018, and is currently a Moore-Sloane Research Fellow in the Center for Data Science at NYU, where he works with the Social Media and Political Participation Lab (SMaPP).

Mia Costa (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

"Improving Measures of Responsiveness for Elite Audit Experiments." This paper was published -- as "How Responsive are Political Elites? A Meta-Analysis of Experiments on Public Officials" -- in Journal of Experimental Political Science.

2017 Bio: Mia Costa is a Political Science PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a focus in American Politics and Political Methodology. Mia studies representation, participation and mobilization, experimental methods, and political networks. She is also interested in survey methodology and have served as a UMass Poll Research Fellow since 2014. She is the Editorial Book Review Associate for the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis and works with the Environmental Defense Fund as a research consultant to design and analyze large-scale Get-Out-the-Vote field experiments. Her work has appeared in Review of Policy Research and Political Behavior.

Mia is an Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth University.

Jennifer Cryer (Stanford University)

"Candidate Identity and Strategic Communication: Exploratory Analysis of the Influence of Race, Gender, and Party on Topic Selection."

2017 Bio: Jennifer is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, in the Department of Political Science. Jenn is also a 2015 National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellow, and a Stanford University E.D.G.E. Doctoral Fellow under the Vice Provost of Graduate Education. Her primary field of study is American politics, and she specializes, broadly, in political psychology, political behavior, and political communication. Specifically, she focuses on race/ethnicity; the perception, and communication strategies, of minority candidates; and the behavior of minority voters. Currently, her research focuses on how candidate race and gender impact voter assessments, and how candidate race and gender influence campaign communication strategies. Moreover, other work addresses how the race of individual voters within a district may compel candidates to engage in certain communication strategies. She draws upon a large corpus of campaign communication texts to observe the slight variation in issue ownership, topic selection and messaging.

Jennifer is expected to receive the Ph.D. in 2020.

Matthew Denny (Pennsylvania State University)

"The Politics of Bureaucratic Constraint: How Congress Uses Legal Language To Achieve Political Goals."

2017 Bio: Matthew Denny is a Ph.D. student in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State and NSF Big Data Social Science IGERT Fellow. The substantive focus of Matt's work centers on the study of Congress, state and local bureaucracy, and organizational dynamics, through the use of computational social science methods. In service of this research agenda, he focuses on developing and implementing machine learning algorithms for analyzing social processes. He has a particular interest in developing new statistical models for text, networks, and text-valued networks. His work has appeared in Social Networks, Public Administration Review, PLoS One, and EMNLP.

Matt is expected to receive the Ph.D. in 2019. Matt is a Research Scientist at Facebook Core Data Science and an Affiliate of the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Laurel Eckhouse (University of California, Berkeley)

"Everyday Risk: Exposure Disproportion and Racial Disparities in Police Shootings."

2017 Bio: Laurel Eckhouse is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Laurel studies the politics of criminal justice, racial and ethnic politics, political methodology, and public law in the United States.  She uses a mix of methods, including quantitative empirical techniques, formal modeling, and ethnographic observation. Her dissertation and book project investigates the institutional origins of inequalities in the application of state power, specifically in the context of policing in the United States.  She works with the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and she recently published a discussion of how machine learning algorithms can reinforce racial bias in the criminal justice system in The Washington Post.

Laurel received the PhD in Political Science in 2017 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver.

Fridolin Linder (Pennsylvania State University)

"Text as Policy: Measuring Policy Similarity through Bill Text Reuse." (coauthored with Bruce Desmarais, Matthew Burgess, and Eugenia Giraudy) This paper was published in Policy Studies Journal.

2017 Bio: Fridolin Linder is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at the Pennsylvania State University. Frido is studying the application of statistical and machine learning tools to social science questions. My projects focus on the application of modern text analysis tools to social media content, legislative and human rights text and the measurement of social scientific concept such as ideology. He works with the Interdependence in Governance and Policy Lab, was a Trainee in the Penn State Big Data Social Science IGERT, and was a Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Frido received his Ph.D. in 2018 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab at New York University.

Anton Strezhnev (Harvard University)

"Why Rich Countries Win Investment Disputes: Taking Selection Seriously."

2017 Bio: Anton Stezhnev is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on developing new methods for estimating causal effects in observational data. Substantively, his research encompasses international political economy, international organizations, and judicial politics. His dissertation studies the strategic and attitudinal factors that influence the decision-making of arbitrators in investor-state arbitration. His poster titled 'A new method for estimating treatment effects under “truncation-by-death"' won the 2016 Society for Political Methodology Poster Award. Recently, his article on dynamic ideal point estimation in the UN General Assembly (with Erik Voeten and Michael Bailey) was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Anton completed the Ph.D. in 2018 and is currently a Penn Law Empirical Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Baobao Zhang (Yale University)

"Quota Sampling Using Facebook Advertisements Can Generate Nationally Representative Opinion Estimates." (coauthored with Matto Mildenberger, Peter D. Howe, Jennifer Marlon, Seth Rosenthal, and Anthony Leiserowitz) This paper was published in Political Science Research & Methods.

2017 Bio: Baobao Zhang is a PhD candidate at Yale University's political science department. Her research interests include survey methodology, causal inference, and public policy. Baobao's dissertation uses natural experiments and field experiments to study how welfare policies affect Americans' political attitudes and behavior. She works as a data scientist for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, and her work on a survey of trauma hospitals in Syria was published in JAMA Surgery.

Baobao is expected to receive the Ph.D. in 2019.

Yang-Yang Zhou (Princeton University)

"How Refugees Affect Conceptions of Citizenship in Africa." This paper is currently in R&R status at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

2017 Bio: Yang-Yang Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics Department at Princeton University, specializing in comparative politics with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Yang-Yang's research interests include migration and citizenship; public service delivery; and experimental, survey, and GIS methodologies. Her dissertation develops a theory of nation-building in Africa by examining how weak borders and forced migration change conceptions of national identity and citizenship for local, host populations. She is working on randomized control trials of policy interventions in East Africa (with Twaweza and MIT) and Afghanistan (with Mercy Corps and Yale), and her work on methods for asking sensitive survey questions has appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Yang-Yang is expected to complete her Ph.D. in 2019. She will be joining the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia as an Assistant Professor in 2019 and will serve as Harvard Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs from 2021 to 2023.