Announcements

Postdoctoral fellowships available

The Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) at Dartmouth College is pleased to announce that it is searching for up to two postdoctoral fellows for the 2019-20 academic year. QSS is an interdisciplinary program that integrates modern statistical, computational, and mathematical tools with social science questions.  Each successful fellow should be highly motivated, collegial, and able to work independently, and the fellow's research agenda should be grounded methodologically in statistics or other computational techniques.

During the academic year, fellows will participate in the intellectual life of QSS by working with QSS faculty and honors students on ongoing research, attending seminars and workshops, and presenting research results.  The stipend for each QSS fellow is $50,000 with a $5,000 account available for equipment, travel, and research materials.  Subject to consultation with the QSS Chair, each fellow may teach a one-quarter course on a subject of his or her choosing; there is an extra stipend for teaching.  The postdoctoral fellowship can be extended through the 2020-21 academic year, subject to negotiation between the fellow and the QSS Chair.

apply here: http://apply.interfolio.com/58249

Can weather affect elections?

Yusaku Horiuchi, Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies, Professor of Government, and Program in Quantitative Social Science steering committee member, has studied the effect of weather on elections.  Will people turn out if it is raining?  Can weather change voting behavior?  Professor Horiuchi's recent article on this subject, co-authored with Woo Chang Kang of The Australian National University, was published in American Politics Research. The article confirms what others have found about a Republican advantage when it rains on the Election Day.  Moreover, based on a compositional data analysis of candidate vote shares in 14 presidential elections since the 1960s, Horiuchi and his collaborator shows that the weather influences not just whether people vote but how they cast their ballots.   They argue that, when the weather is bad, individuals' moods are affected.  People tend to become more risk-averse in the face of bad weather and this brings out conservative, and hence pro-Republican, views.

In light of the 2018 midterm elections, weather has been covered extensively in the American media.   Professor Horiuchi's contribution to this area has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Atlantic and CNBC.

The Kavanaugh confirmation polarized women and motivated them to vote

Jin Woo Kim, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, recently authored a Monkey Cage article on the effect of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh on political polarization in the United States.  Kim's findings are based on an experiment using over 4,000 United States residents that was carried out via Amazon Mechanical Turk. He first surveyed his subjects in early October 2018 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating allegations that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. Kim then contacted his respondents a second time several days later, randomizing the timing of survey invitation so that half of the his participants responded to a follow-up survey before the Senate floor vote and the other half responded after. Results from the study indicate that the Kavanaugh confirmation vote polarized opinions toward the parties among women.  Specifically, Republican-leaning women expressed greater interest in voting for Republicans and independent women expressed greater interest in voting for Democratic candidates after the confirmation vote (compared to before it took place).

Brendan Nyhan, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who has worked with Kim since he came to Dartmouth, also noted that Kim's findings provide important new evidence for how the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings helped to polarize opinion toward the Supreme Court. In his Monkey Cage article, Kim finds the gap in partisan approval of the Court increased by nine percentage points among men and 19 percentage points among women after the confirmation vote.

Kim received his doctorate in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.  He has been at Dartmouth since 2017 and is currently working on several research projects examining whether factual information can change partisan minds and whether political rumor diffusion affects mass opinions.

Has Trump Damaged the U.S. Image Abroad?

With Alexander Agadjanian '18, Yusaku Horiuchi the Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies and Program in Quantitative Social Science Steering Committee member, recently published an article, "Has Trump Damaged the U.S. Image Abroad? Decomposing the Effects of Policy Messages on Foreign Public Opinion," in Political Behavior.  The article considers the extent to which residents of Japan have reacted to United States President Donald Trump's foreign policy messages. 

The abstract of their article reads as follows:

The U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently made foreign countries central to his political messages, often conveying animosity. But do foreign citizens react more to the speaker of these messages—Trump himself—or their content? More generally, when people are exposed to messages sent from foreign countries, are their attitudes influenced by information heuristics or information content in messages? Although related studies are abundant in the literature of American public opinion, these questions are not fully examined in the literature of foreign public opinion. To address them, we used Japan as a case and fielded a survey experiment exposing citizens to U.S. policy messages that varied by source, policy content, and issue salience. Results suggest that while the source cue (Trump attribution) causes negative perceptions of the U.S., the policy content (cooperative vs. uncooperative) has a larger effect in shaping opinion of the U.S. Furthermore, analysis of interaction effects shows that only when U.S. policy approach is uncooperative does the Trump attribution have significantly negative and large effects. We conclude that foreign citizens rely more on policy content in transnational opinion formation—an aspect that past research in this area has overlooked. Substantively, these findings may demonstrate that even under a presidency that has alienated foreign countries and seemingly undermined U.S. stature in the world, foreign opinion toward the U.S. does not hinge entirely on its political leader. In short, Trump has not irreparably damaged the U.S. image abroad.

During the 2018-19 academic year, Professor Horiuchi is on leave from Dartmouth and is currently Visiting Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently working on a book project with Professor Benjamin Goldsmith at the Australian National University. His research examines the causes and consequences of global public opinion about the United States under three recent presidents, Bush, Obama, and Trump. For other projects, see his website.

Since graduating in June 2018, Alexander has been working as a Senior Research Support Associate at the MIT Election and Data Science Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alexander's responsibilities include helping with the lab's effort to collect, manage, and disseminate current and historical election data, and Alexander is presently researching various topics in elections and political behavior.

QSS Alumnus Published in the New Journal of Physics

Herbert Chang '18 recently published his QSS honors thesis in the New Journal of Physics.  Herbert completed and defended his thesis in May 2018 and in the summer after developed it further with his advisor, Feng Fu of the Department of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.  Titled "Co-diffusion of social contagions," Herbert's thesis explores multiple contagion processes which interact on a multiplex network. His work shows that intricate interdependencies give rise to new and fascinating phenomena that are applicable to wider contexts such as technological and product diffusion. Of Herbert, Professor Fu writes, "Thanks to the generous support of the QSS Program, his QSS thesis work is an important and innovative contribution at a time when dynamical channels and technologies influence each other. Hence there is a great desire to quantify synergy and how their inherent qualities influence each other."

Herbert is presently studying artificial intelligence in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.  He is focusing on agents and knowledge representation and hopes further to study the governance of artificial intelligence for human-machine cooperation.