Our own, John Cho '22, a Quantitative Social Science (QSS) major, is considering a career in voting rights law.
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John Cho `22---Government and Quantitative Social Science (QSS) double major at Dartmouth College---presented two research papers at the 79th Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference held in Chicago on April 7-10, 2022.
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With co-authors Kayla Hamann '22, Jennifer Lee '22, Gabrielle Levy '22, and Victor Wu '22, Dartmouth Professor of Government Brendan Nyhan recently published, "Republicans Are More Optimistic about Economic Mobility, but No Less Accurate" in Research & Politics. Matt Grossman, of the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, was a co-author of the article as well.
The four Dartmouth students who helped write this article were James O. Freedman Presidential Scholars supported by Dartmouth Undergraduate Advising and Research. The students started working with Professors Grossman and Nyhan in the summer of 2020 and continued spring 2021. They took the lead on both the data analysis and writing of the article, successfully dealing with all the challenges posed by remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of the four, Victor Wu '22 is triple-majoring in Quantitative Social Science, Environmental Studies, and Government. Victor joined the research project because Professor Nyhan's course on political misinformation piqued his interest in research on partisan misperceptions. Victor's student co-authors are majoring in a mixture of Government and Mathematical Data Science.
The Nyhan et al. article represents a key tenet of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), on whose steering committee Professor Nyhan serves. The program's curriculum emphasizes the importance of research, and all students working in it must complete independent one-quarter research projects in their last year on campus or write honors theses. Victor will be completing his project in Winter 2022.
The abstract of the article is as follows:
Do Americans overestimate economic mobility? Using representative surveys of the public and local government officials, we assess claims of widespread misperceptions about economic mobility by measuring the accuracy of participants' perceptions of both relative and absolute mobility. Republican members of the public and government officials are more optimistic than are Democrats about poor children's chances of reaching the highest income quintile (relative mobility) and earning more than their parents (absolute mobility). Democrats also rate race and family wealth as more important to children's chances than do Republicans. However, partisan tendencies to overestimate or underestimate mobility are roughly symmetric despite differences in optimism; we only observe small and inconsistent differences in belief accuracy by party for both the public and local officials. Finally, accuracy is no greater for perceptions of state and local mobility than at the national level.
Darren Colby, a member of the Class of 2022 at Dartmouth College, is the author of a new article, "Chaos from order: a network analysis of in-fighting before and after El Chapo's arrest." Published in the journal Connections, this article began as a project in a course QSS 41 in network analysis in the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS).
The abstract of the article is as follows:
The effect of leadership decapitation—the capture or killing of the leader of an armed group—on future violence has been studied with competing conclusions. In Mexico, leadership decapitation has been found to increase violence and in-fighting among drug cartels. However, the causal pathways between leadership decapitation and in-fighting are unclear. In this article, it is hypothesized that leadership decapitation will weaken alliances between armed actors, lead to greater preferential attachment in networks of cartels and militias, and result in greater transitive closure as cartels seek to expand their power. These hypotheses are tested with a stochastic actor oriented model on a network dataset of episodes of infighting among cartels and the militias formed to opposed them between the five years before and after Joaquín, "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was arrested in 2016. The results show that alliances have virtually no effect on the decision of cartels and militias to fight each other; weaker organizations faced a higher reputational cost after El Chapo's detention, and post-arrest cartel in-fighting did not increase as a result of uncertainty about the relative balance of power among cartels.
Darren's professor in QSS 41 was Antonio Sirianni, who is a post-doctoral fellow in QSS. Dr. Sirianni has taught QSS 41 for the past several years, and of Darren's project he writes, "Darren came into QSS41 with a really fascinating topic and data set to examine. He skillfully applied methods covered in the course to reveal important insights on cartel structure and interaction. The resulting article shows expertise in both a sophisticated dynamic network modeling technique and broader network science concepts."
Join us on October 20 to hear from professors, post-doctoral fellows, and current Ph.D. students.
The panel takes place at 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm, and you can attend in person in Life Sciences Center 205 or on Zoom (Meeting ID: 496 706 2684).