Announcements

QSS students and faculty member publish on misperceptions about Covid-19 and climate change

One of the hallmarks of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) at Dartmouth College is student research, and this is nicely exemplified by a recent article published by Professor of Government Brendan Nyhan and the 14 students who took his Experiments in Politics course (QSS 30.03) in Spring 2020.  This course is cross-listed in the Department of Government as GOVT 83.21.  The article by Professor Nyhan and his 14 co-authors is titled, "The limited effects of partisan and consensus messaging in correcting science misperceptions" was published in Research & Politics 8(2). 

The abstract of the article is follows:

The spread of COVID-19 misinformation highlights the need to correct misperceptions about health and science. Research on climate change suggests that informing people about a scientific consensus can reduce misinformation endorsement, but these studies often fail to isolate the effects of consensus messaging and may not translate to other issues. We therefore conduct a survey experiment comparing standard corrections with those citing a scientific consensus for three issues: COVID-19 threat, climate change threat, and vaccine efficacy. We find that consensus corrections are never more effective than standard corrections at countering misperceptions and generally fail to reduce them with only one exception. We also find that consensus corrections endorsed by co-partisans do not reduce misperceptions relative to standard corrections, while those endorsed by opposition partisans are viewed as less credible and can potentially even provoke a backfire effect. These results indicate that corrections citing a scientific consensus, including corrective messages from partisans, are less effective than previous research suggests when compared with appropriate baseline messages.


Among the student co-authors of the article are several who are majoring, or have majored, in QSS.  These individuals are Vignesh Chockalingam '20, Erik Jones '20, Zoe Chandra '21, Amy Hu '21, Justin Kramer '21, Madeleine Sach '21, Yong Sheng Ng '21, Sarah Solomon '21, and Victor Wu '22.  Madeleine recently defended her QSS honors thesis, written over the course of the 2020-21 academic year.  The title of the thesis is, "The Effect of Cues from Groups with Issue Relevance on American Public Opinion."

Professor Nyhan, a member of the QSS Steering Committee, writes regularly with QSS students and teaches his experiments class every year.  Other sections of this course are taught by Assistant Professor of Government Mia Costa and Assistant Professor of Government Charles Crabtree.

QSS student and faculty member publish game theoretic article on voter turnout

Cameron Guage '22 and Assistant Professor of Mathematics Feng Fu recently published an article in Dynamic Games and Applications. Their article is titled, "Asymmetric Partisan Voter Turnout Games," and its abstract is as follows:

Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and expressive benefits of their vote when deciding whether or not to abstain in an election, introducing an asymmetry that most other models do not consider. Allowing learning processes within our electorate, we analyze what evolutionarily stable strategies are rationalizable under various conditions. Upon varying electorate size, the partisan split of the electorate, and the degree to which an electorate takes underdog considerations into account in its payoff structure, we find that different equilibria arise. Our model predicts comparative statics that are consistent with voter behavior, specifically affirming a "size effect," in which turnout decreases as electorate size increases. Furthermore, relaxing some of our preliminary assumptions eliminates some of the discrepancies between the predictions of our model and empirical voter behavior. In particular, our work demonstrates that misperceptions about the partisan split of an electorate may account for high turnout behavior.

Cameron is a member of the Class of 2022 at Dartmouth College, and he is majoring in Quantitative Social Science and Mathematics. He first encountered game theory in QSS 18, "Introduction to Game Theory,"  taken in winter of 2019, and in the winter of 2020 he started a project with Professor Fu that is supported by the Mellam Family Foundation Research Award at Dartmouth, a Sophomore Research Scholarship, and the Byrne Scholars Program.  In the 2020-21 academic year, Cameron is a presidential scholar with Professor Jason Houle of the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth.  As a presidential scholar, Cameron is working on importing, cleaning, and analyzing a new longitudinal survey on race and student loan debt that were collected as part of Professor Houle's book project.

Professor Fu, who is a member of the QSS Steering Commitee, teaches QSS 30.04, " Evolutionary Game Theory and Application." He regularly advises QSS students and is currently working on evolutionary dynamics of human behavior.

New articles by QSS faculty members

Yusaku Horiuchi, member of the Steering Committee of the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), and Charles Crabtree, QSS Affiliate, recently published articles on the effect of automatic voter registration in Japan and on the use of audit studies in political science, respectively.

Professor Horiuchi, who is the Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies at Dartmouth College, wrote his article with two co-authors, Hiroto Katsumata of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo, and Ethan Woodard.  Ethan completed the MALS program at Dartmouth in 2015 and is currently working at Dartmouth as a budget analyst.  As a masters student, Ethan took several courses with Professor Horiuchi, and these developed his interest in Japanese politics.  The abstract of Professor Horiuchi's article in Political Behavior is as follows:

Although reaching the voting age and getting enrolled in the voters' list is an essential first step in the electoral process, existing studies have rarely investigated its effects on citizens' socio-political experiences and civic attitudes. To fill this gap, we leverage a natural experiment in Japan, where citizens who turn eighteen years old and become eligible to vote in elections are automatically registered. For this inquiry, just after the 2016 House of Councillors election in Japan, we invited thousands of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Japanese citizens to take an on-line survey. The results of our exact-date-of-birth regression discontinuity analysis suggest that becoming eligible to vote increases young citizens' interaction with other voters and facilitates their information acquisition efforts before the election. Therefore, obtaining vote eligibility for an upcoming election is accompanied by some degree of increased civic engagement. However, it is not enough to change their civic attitudes, such as trust in government and a sense of efficacy in the democratic process. We argue that the intensity of civic engagement under the automatic registration system is weak due to the lack of citizens' self-initiated actions for the registration itself.

Professor Horiuchi regularly publishes with Dartmouth students and advises QSS Honors Theses. He will be teaching a core QSS course, Data Visualization , this upcoming spring quarter.

Professor Crabtree's article is co-authored wth Daniel Butler of the University of California at San Diego and appears in a Cambridge University Press book on experiments. According to the Press's summary, "Audit studies typically involve researchers sending a message to or making a request of some sample in order to unobtrusively measure subjects' behaviors. These studies are often conducted as a way of measuring bias or discrimination. We introduce readers to audit studies, describe their basic design features, and then provide advice on effectively implementing these studies. In particular, we provide several suggestions aimed at improving the internal, ecological, and external validity of audit study findings."

Professor Crabtree, of the Department of Government at Dartmouth College , is currently in Japan, where he researches discrimination and holds a position as a Senior Fellow at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research.  He taught Government 10  (Quantitative Political Analysis) and Government 83.21 / Quantitative Social Science 30.03 (Experiments in Politics) this past winter quarter and is working on various projects, which primarily focus on issues related to discrimination and inclusion in American and Japanese politics.

Connor Turner '20 to present research at SABR Analytics Conference

Connor Turner graduated in June 2020 from Dartmouth College with a degree in Quantitative Social Science and a minor in Economics. After leaving Dartmouth, Connor started The Diamond, a website devoted to baseball where he posts his original commentary, research, and analysis of the game.

In his last year at Dartmouth, Connor completed a research project that uses Markov Chains to analyze outcomes in pitcher-batter matchups. The goal of the project was to use the predictive power of Markov Chains to gain insights on how the playing style of certain pitchers and hitters affect each other, and to use these insights to make predictions about a hypothetical at-bat between the two. Not only does this project show the expected probabilities for certain outcomes in these matchups, but it also shows how these probabilities shift at different points of the at-bat. Connor's research project was guided by Robert Cooper, who works with fourth-year students in Quantitative Social Science who are completing one-quarter projects. According to Prof. Cooper, "Connor executed a senior project that was close to his heart. In the QSS quarter project, we provide a structure for students to fully realize independent research... we provide the instruction, motivation, and support to allow students see their projects to the end, taking full advantage of the skills they have acquired in the QSS program."

Connor's research project will be presented at the 2021 SABR Analytics Conference, hosted by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), which is the premier organization for statistical and historical baseball research in the United States. Connor's will be one of 18 featured research projects at this year's conference, which will be presented to an audience of MLB team representatives, fellow researchers, SABR members, and students from around the country.

QSS post-doctoral fellow involved in research on political extremism

Annie Chen is a fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College.  After completing a BA in Political Science at the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science at McGill University, Annie joined the Bright Line Watch team at Dartmouth.  Since that time, she has worked on surveys about democratic erosion in the United States, investigated the consumption of extremist content on YouTube, and is now gearing up to field an experiment to test the effect of news feed algorithms on engagement with misinformation with researchers at the University of South Florida.

Although Annie had been introduced to quantitative methods in her undergraduate degree, she did not fully appreciate how quantitative techniques could be applied to a range of social science questions until she became actively involved in research during her graduate education. Annie is especially grateful to her mentor at McGill, Professor Aaron Erlich (a Dartmouth alum), for providing her opportunities to develop her data analysis abilities and computational skills. She is thrilled to be able to continue sharpening these skills at Dartmouth through diverse projects and alongside incredible collaborators.

Annie works closely with Brendan Nyhan and the John Carey , who are co-directors of Bright Line Watch, a group of scholars focusing on the health of democracy in the United States.  According to Professor Nyhan, "Annie is an incredible data scientist who has been essential to the success of our joint research on YouTube and the effect of algorithmic rankings on exposure to quality information online." Professor Carey adds, "Annie has been a huge asset to Bright Line Watch. She's smart, careful, and creative and she has great instincts for how to communicate quantitative results visually. Bright Line's work is a lot better for having Annie on board."  Anne is a co-author of the recent Bright Line Watch report, "American democracy at the start of the Biden presidency"

Annie is one of two fellows in residence at QSS this year.  The other is Anthony Sirianni, a sociologist who is teaching a course this spring on network analysis.