Announcements

Three QSS majors from the Class of 2019 named to Phi Beta Kappa

On June 8, 2019, 97 seniors from the Dartmouth College Class of 2019 were inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.

Among these were three majors from the Program in Quantitative Social Science.  The New Hampshire chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was established at Dartmouth in 1787.  It is the fourth-oldest chapter in the United States as described by the Dartmouth College Registrar

QSS congratulates its majors who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa: Yihang Genna Liu, Amanda Katharine Sload, and Jennifer A. Wu.  These students exemplify the highest ideals of dedication to academic achievement.

QSS course helps graduates land dream jobs

Shane Weisberg '16 and Garrett Schirmer '16 both scored jobs in major league sports with the help of QSS 30.01 Sports Analytics. Both stress how they use knowledge gained from the course in their professions. "A lot of people come in from math or economics, but they don't have the applied side of things, which I got from this sports analytics course, so I have definitely found that to be an advantage. This one course opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about problems." Schirmer said. Read more in the Dartmouth News.

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.