The 2026 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) took place in Chicago in late April. Hermia Miaoxuan Huang `26, who is majoring in Quantitative Social Science (QSS), attended the conference and presented a poster based on her honors thesis being written under the supervision of Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science Herbert Chang. Hermia’s poster was titled, “The Political Economy of Cross-Border AI Model Diffusion.” Hermia presented her poster to attendees from the University of Pennsylvania, Loyola Marymount University, and the University of Texas, as well as a geopolitical strategist at a consulting institute, among others. Hermia explained the creative use of LLM-assisted labeling strategies in dataset construction. According to Hermia, the best part of presenting a poster at MPSA was receiving feedback not only from academics, but also from practitioners and policymakers on the real-world implications of her research.
Professor Chang, Hermia’s advisor, presented a paper, “Visual Platforms and Generative AI: Effects on Political Discourse and Policy Preference in the 2024 U.S. Elections,” on a panel organized by former Rockefeller Center Postdoc Hwayoung Shin. He also chaired the session at MPSA on, “Framing Taiwan: Media, Power, and Perception in a Contested Information Order.”
Associate Professor of Government Mia Costa, who is a member of the QSS Steering Committee, also attending MPSA 2026. She presented "Candidate Roots: Perceptions of Place and Region in U.S. Politics," a project co-authored with Jayanth Uppaluri `24, who was a pre-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth in 2024-25 and is starting a doctoral program at the Harvard Kennedy School in the fall.
Professor Costa is a co-author of another MPSA presentation, this one titled, "The Limits of Descriptive Rhetoric: How Identity Appeals and Policy Alignment Shape Perceptions of Legislators." Her co-author is Jake Green, a masters student at the Kennedy School.
Finally, Professor of Quantitative Social Science Michael Herron presented at MPSA as well. His talk was titled, “Comparing equilibria under ranked choice and plurality voting.”