QSS Steering Committee member Yusaku Horiuchi was interviewed by The D on his teaching, research, background and interests. Read the full article here.
In a recent article in The Upshot entitled Nearly Half of Americans Don't Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens, Dartmouth lecturer Kyle Dropp and QSS faculty member Brendan Nyhan show that many Americans are not aware of the fact that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. This knowledge effects whether or not individuals believe Puerto Rico should receive additional government aid in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
DJ Flynn, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, and Yusaku Horiuchi, an affiliated faculty member in the program who teaches a popular data visualization course, have published a new article in Science Advances. This article, which is co-authored with Jeremy Fewerda of the Department of Government, is an analysis of attitudes in the United States toward refugee resettlement. Ferwerda, Flynn, and Horiuchi show that Americans are less supportive of refugee resettlement locally than they are elsewhere in the United States. This highlights how refugee resettlement is a collective action problem facing the country. Ferwerda, Flynn, and Horiuchi also show that threatening media frames reduce support for refugee resettlement. In addition to the article in Science Advances, this research has also been covered in CITYLAB, (Even Liberals Can be Refugee NIMBYs) and in The Dartmouth News (Study Shows Support for Refugees Drops Off Closer to Home).
Erik Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science, has published an article in Journal of Politics on the role of information in partisan voting. Erik received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 2017 and started his fellowship at Dartmouth in August. Using a survey experiment and an observational study of voting in Congressional elections, Erik's article shows that more informative media environments reduce voters' reliance on partisanship to evaluate politicians. Erik's dissertation at Stanford was titled "Causes and Consequences of News Media Content." At Dartmouth, Erik will work on a project examining the political consequences of the widespread layoffs of newspaper journalists that have occurred over the past decade.
QSS Steering Committee member Brendan Nyhan was awarded the American Political Science Association's Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Emerging Scholar Award for 2017. Professor Nyhan shared this honor with Peter K. Enns of Cornell University. This award is presented annually to the top scholar in the field of elections and voting behavior who is within 10 years of her or his doctorate. Professor Nyhan studies the relationship between misperceptions and behavior and how to correct incorrect information in ways that might produce different outcomes. His work covers a wide range of topics, including conspiracy theories, public financing, media fact checking, the role of Congressional staff in policy making, campaign strategy, political persuasion, and social networks. Professor Nyhan has published in top academic journals and writes for the New York Times Upshot blog. Along with QSS Steering Committee member John Carey, Professor Nyhan is a cofounder of Bright Line Watch, a group of four political scientists who "monitor democratic practices and call attention to threats to American Democracy."