Category: Featured Faculty Research

Student writing in Notebook

Democrats wrongly assume only Trump’s words alienate Latinos

Marcel Roman, Assistant Professor of Government, has co-authored an article for The Washington Post with Amanda Sahar d’Urso, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Government. The piece explains how “Critics of the term “Latinx” argue that only 4 percent of Hispanics use it because most are offended by how it anglicizes Spanish or signals elitism. Our research shows…

Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt publish op ed in NYT

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Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, and Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, have published an op ed in the New York Times titled “There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.” The piece, which in itself has received much commentary, tackles the topic of authoritarianism…

Study published during Harvard Climate Action Week

A new study – led by Stephen Ansolabehere, the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government – has launched as part of Harvard Climate Action Week (June 10-14), hosted by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The conference invites climate experts, leaders, and stakeholders to come together and explore solutions to the climate crisis’s most…

Persecuted Minorities and Defensive Cooperation: Contributions to Public Goods by Hindus and Muslims in Delhi

Melani Cammett Faculty, Comparative Politics How does intergroup inequality, specifically minority experiences of persecution, affect contributions to local public goods? Based on an original survey experiment and qualitative research in slums in Delhi, we examine how Hindus and Muslims respond to social norms around promoting cooperation on community sanitation. Mainstream theories of development predict greater…

The Election Effect: Democratic Leaders in Inter-group Conflict (with Sarah Hummel and Yon Soo Park)

Stephen Chaudoin Faculty, International Relations Overview: Many interactions between countries depend on choices made by democratically selected leaders. We argue that the experience of being elected alters subsequent leader behavior at the international level, a phenomenon we call the election effect. Specifically, democratic election intensifies in-group identification and generates a sense of obligation to voters,…

If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe it’s the Wrong Model

Gary King Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Election surprises are hardly surprising. Unexpected challengers, deaths, retirements, scandals, campaign strategies, real world events, and heresthetical maneuvers all conspire to confuse the best models. Quantitative researchers usually model district-level elections with linear functions of measured covariates, to account for systematic variation, and normal error terms, to…

Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project

Kosuke Imai Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Together with two graduate students – Christopher Kenny and Tyler Simko – as well as an alumni of this department – Shiro Kuriwaki at Yale University, we developed a simulation algorithm and used it to detect gerrymandering. Our algorithm was discussed by supreme court justices in one…

Measuring the Partisan Behavior of U.S. Newspapers, 1880 to 1980

James SnyderFaculty, American Politics Overview: In this project—joint with Shigeo Hirano at Columbia University—we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage and commentary of partisan activities, institutions and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes…