Research Opportunities
Undergraduates can take advantage of opportunities to participate in the latest research happening in the world of political science. Gov92r allows you to conduct research in the Government department for academic credit. It is graded SAT/UNSAT. If you are interested in any of these projects, please contact the supervisors directly. You will need to submit the Gov 92r form (available here) to Karen Kaletka before you can register for the course on my.harvard.
Fall 2025
Prof. Stephen Chaudoin
Corpus Churn
This project will investigate the underlying corpus for several prominently used text-as-data sources. Corpus churn refers to changes over time in the coverage of sources, such as newspapers or other outlets. This is largely unacknowledged, even though the problem is likely severe and likely affects many downstream analyses. This project will attempt to describe the severity of the problem, its implications, and build diagnostics and sensitivity testing for researchers hoping to use larger text-as-data corpuses.
Prerequisites (courses and/or methodological skills): Must be able to use R for data set management, visualization, and analyses.
Contact: If you’re interested, send a CV and a short paragraph on why this project interests you to: chaudoin@fas.harvard.edu
Prof. Alisha Holland
Radical State Reform
How do populist outsiders reform the bureaucracy? To what extent do ideas about technology and government efficiency shape their state reform projects? This project explores radical state reform projects, meaning political attempts to reshape government bureaucracy in its structure, aims, and practices, in three countries—Argentina, Indonesia, and the United States. We will be gathering data on the extent of bureaucratic changes, the ideologies that motivated bureaucratic reform projects, and the ways in which new technologies have been incorporated into new government models. This is a preliminary, exploratory project so we will also be reviewing literature and data sources to embark on a broader comparative study.
Prerequisites (courses and/or methodological skills): Ideally some background in computer science or data science, but not required.
Contact: If you’re interested, send a CV and a short paragraph on why this project interests you to: aholland@fas.harvard.edu