How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese statewritten by Yuhua Wang Yuhua Wang’s new book highlights a fundamental trade-off in China’s state building, which he calls the sovereign’s dilemma: a coherent elite that could take collective actions to strengthen the state was also capable of revolting against the ruler. OVERVIEW: China was the world’s leading superpower…
Gary King Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Election surprises are hardly surprising. Unexpected challengers, deaths, retirements, scandals, campaign strategies, real world events, and heresthetical maneuvers all conspire to confuse the best models. Quantitative researchers usually model district-level elections with linear functions of measured covariates, to account for systematic variation, and normal error terms, to…
Kosuke Imai Faculty, Methods and Formal Theory Overview: Together with two graduate students – Christopher Kenny and Tyler Simko – as well as an alumni of this department – Shiro Kuriwaki at Yale University, we developed a simulation algorithm and used it to detect gerrymandering. Our algorithm was discussed by supreme court justices in one…
James SnyderFaculty, American Politics Overview: In this project—joint with Shigeo Hirano at Columbia University—we study newspaper partisan behavior and content, which we measure using coverage and commentary of partisan activities, institutions and actors. We use this measure to describe the levels of relative partisan behavior during the period 1880 to 1900, and to describe changes…
David Beavers Graduate Student, American Politics With Jennifer L. Hochschild Overview: Research generally finds that exposure to corrective information attenuates misperceptions, and that as the cost of acquiring information diminishes and the stakes for possessing accurate information increase, factual accuracy increases. In an ongoing project, Jennifer Hochschild and I examine a puzzling counterexample. Despite ample…
George Yean Graduate Student, International Relations Overview: Post-Cold War global economic order is in trouble. As a result of rising protectionism, mercantilism, security concerns, tensions between geopolitical rivals, and the current account and currency crisis, the order has been fundamentally undermined. There are losers and winners in the international order, as there are in the…
Noah Dasanaike, Graduate Student, Comparative Politics Overview: In my research article, I deconstruct the concept of peripherality into several dimensions and estimates the effect of these dimensions on support for the radical right. More specifically, I propose physical, social, and economic dimensions of peripherality, drawing heavily from Bourdieu’s types of capital, and outline measures through…
