Research Opportunities
Undergraduates can take advantage of opportunities to participate in the latest research happening in the world of political science. Gov92r allows you to conduct research in the Government department for academic credit. It is graded SAT/UNSAT. If you are interested in any of these projects, please contact the supervisors directly. You will need to submit the Gov 92r form (available here) to Karen Kaletka before you can register for the course on my.harvard.
Fall 2025
Prof. Stephen Chaudoin
Corpus Churn
This project will investigate the underlying corpus for several prominently used text-as-data sources. Corpus churn refers to changes over time in the coverage of sources, such as newspapers or other outlets. This is largely unacknowledged, even though the problem is likely severe and likely affects many downstream analyses. This project will attempt to describe the severity of the problem, its implications, and build diagnostics and sensitivity testing for researchers hoping to use larger text-as-data corpuses.
Prerequisites (courses and/or methodological skills): Must be able to use R for data set management, visualization, and analyses.
Contact: If you’re interested, send a CV and a short paragraph on why this project interests you to: chaudoin@fas.harvard.edu
Prof. Christoph Mikulaschek
United Nations: How does it work and what is its impact?
I am looking for an RA to support my ongoing research on the UN Security Council and General Assembly. Specifically, I work on a book that examines UN decision-making, compliance with its resolutions, and its effect on media coverage and public opinion in the U.S. and other countries. The RA would be asked to conduct independent research under my supervision on these topics. Potential tasks would include gathering and analyzing news media coverage data from online databases, evaluating and summarizing archival evidence that I have compiled, surveying and summarizing scholarly literatures, and conducting original research to update my data set on UN missions in conflict theaters. The specific tasks will depend on your qualifications. Interest in international relations and in learning how to conduct social science research is a precondition. Some familiarity with the statistical software program R is a plus, but not required. German and/or Turkish language skills would also be a plus.
Prerequisites (courses and/or methodological skills): Interest in international relations and in learning how to conduct social science research is a precondition. Some familiarity with the statistical software program R is a plus, but not required. German and/or Turkish language skills would also be a plus.
Contact: If you’re interested, send a CV and a short paragraph on why this project interests you to: mikulaschek@gov.harvard.edu