QSS scholars present at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Faculty and students from the Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) at Dartmouth College recently presented their research at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).  This conference took place in Vancouver, and attending were Tracy Weener `26, who is majoring in QSS and writing an honors thesis this academic year under the supervision of Professor Herbert Chang; QSS Postdoctoral Fellow Mathieu Lavigne; Assistant Professor Keng-Chi Chang, who is brand new to QSS and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego; Assistant Professor Herbert Chang `18; and QSS Steering Committee member Professor Brendan Nyhan.

Professor John Carey, who has previously served on the QSS Steering Committee and now is Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been involved with APSA for several decades.  He writes that, "I'm so happy to see QSS scholars — from students to post-docs to faculty members — presenting at this conference.  The QSS community is applying leading-edge methods to important questions and the seeing so many QSS scholars at such a high-profile conference really underscores that."

At the conference, Tracy Weener presented a paper examining the influence of generational politics in Taiwan's 2024 presidential election and the changing attitudes of Taiwan's young voters toward international relations. This presentation was part of the Taiwanese Youth and Generation Gap panel organized within the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies. Tracy would like to thank her faculty advisors, Professor Herbert Chang and former QSS Steering Committee member Professor Yusaku Horiuchi, as well as the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth for their support.

Mathieu Lavigne presented two research projects at APSA, in addition to co-organizing a one-day workshop on Technology and the Future of Democracy, which brought together academics and practitioners to discuss the threats and opportunities that new technologies pose to key democratic institutions. Mathieu's first paper, co-authored with Brian Fogarty (Notre Dame), John Carey (Dartmouth), Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler (Southampton), analyzes what Americans encountered online around the 2020 and 2022 elections to explain why false beliefs about election fraud persist despite the widespread availability of accurate information.  His second presentation focused on the role of Facebook and Instagram in the spread of election fraud narratives and pro-insurrection content during the 2020 U.S. election. This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study, a large-scale research partnership between Meta and a team of academic researchers examining the impact of social media on democratic processes. The other lead academic authors of this study are Brendan Nyhan, Rocio Titiunik (Princeton), and Jack Andolina, a post-baccalaureate fellow in QSS.

Keng-Chi Chang arrived at Dartmouth this July.  His APSA presentation examined whether TikTok's recommender system advances the interests of the government of China by collecting large-scale data on removals of TikTok videos and measuring video downranking — where view growths suddenly stopped, a subtle form of content moderation. This project is part of collaboration with New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics and the China Data Lab at University of California, San Diego. Professor Chang also contributed to another APSA paper, where he and coauthors analyzed a uniquely granular dataset of international student visa records, showing how rising US-China tensions have triggered a decline in Chinese student enrollment, especially in sensitive academic fields at the doctoral level. This fall, Professor Chang is teaching QSS 20 (Modern Statistical Computing), a core class in the QSS curriculum.

Professor Herbert Chang has taught in QSS for three years and graduated from Dartmouth in 2018.  He presented his work, with Tracy Weener and Professor Horiuchi, on artificial intelligence's impact on the 2024 United States Election in two sessions:  Technology and Future of Technology Workshop and a session in political methodology. Professor Chang also presented his analysis on a historic social movement in Taiwan, mediated by Meta Platform's Threads. Taiwan account for a staggering 24% of Threads' global traffic.