The Political Scientist

Sentiment expressed on social media is far from a scientific poll of the overall population's feelings toward President Trump, but it can offer a valuable measure of expressed attitudes within the online public square. Below are two figures that offer telling insights into current discussion of "#POTUS" among Twitter users as of February 25, 2017 (the day of this writing). Using the NRC Emotion Lexicon in R, I analyzed a dataset of 2,896 Tweets tweeted by 2,455 unique Twitter users that I scraped just this afternoon. [ Note : I'm still collecting more Tweets as I write this post, and it'll take some time before I have a sizable dataset.] The positive vs. negative sentiment score counts per Tweet clearly lean positive. Much of this positive sentiment, as the below figure shows, likely results from a substantial amount of trust that appears in several Tweets that contain #POTUS. While fear , anger , sadness , and disgust all make showings, trust , joy ,...

My research for my master's thesis centered on the intersection of foreign aid and immigration -- specifically, on the question of whether foreign aid has an impact on international migrant flows. Various political scientists and economists have at times considered this question, but most never have given it much serious consideration. Unlike these scholars, I apparently was curious enough about this topic to dedicate months of research, data collection, and analysis to answering it (either that or I didn't have much of a life...). Findings My analysis ultimately showed that when wealthy countries increase official development aid (ODA) sent to a given developing country in a given year, the result is an increase in immigration from said developing country the following year. This finding held true, even when controlling for several factors that consistently have been shown to have an impact on migrant inflows. [ Note : The analysis incl...

The day has come and gone on this 20th of January in 2017. Donald Trump has been sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, and like his predecessors, Trump gave an inaugural address during today's ceremony. Lots of pundits, of course, have spent today closely analyzing, scrutinizing, praising, and whatever-else-ing Trump's speech. Like everyone of these pundits, I have personal thoughts about the events that have transpired today as well, but, rather than simply contribute to the discordant  cacophony of punditry a contrived opinion of my own, I'm choosing  to do something more constructive (or at least less politically volatile ) in an effort to offer something of novel import to discussion about President Trump's address. Rather than qualitatively sift through every word and nuance of Trump's inaugural address, I'll do something political science-y: use some textual analysis techniques to leverage quantifiable insights from Trump's speech. The...

In a hyper-partisan world, it can feel like even the most mundane of conversations suddenly can erupt into a politically charged jousting match. However, more often than not, those who engage in political discussions are more likely to do so with likeminded individuals in an echo chamber where congruent world views are reinforced (and even strengthened) and differing opinions are either nowhere to be seen or openly derided. It certainly can't help matters much that those who are most likely to engage in online political discussions also happen to have more extreme liberal or conservative ideological views. In 2010, Pew Research Center conducted a post midterm election tracking survey that contained a number of questions related to online political engagement. Whether or not respondents had ever engaged in an online political discussion was one of the questions asked in the survey. When broken down by ideological intensity, the share of respondents in each ideological cate...

During the (agonizingly) long period leading up to the 2016 presidential election, much ado was made about whether Republican Donald J. Trump's success was (partially) chalked up to his political outsider status. While it's hard to know for sure, some of my own research suggests, at the very least, that presidential candidates were motivated to spend much less time in 2016 focusing on their prior experience as government officials, at least when it comes to primary and general election debates. Political scientists who study presidential debates have shown that candidates both influence and are constrained by public opinion. Presidential hopefuls must cater their debate performances to shifts in public opinion in order appeal to voters, while at the same time candidates must try to influence the agenda of debates to suit their own purposes. It's a delicate balancing act. The content of presidential debates, therefore, can tell us a lot about p...

With election time coming up soon (Nov. 8th!), and with the headlines obsessed with the presidential race, I wanted to take a moment to focus on down ballot races--in particular, congressional district races for the House of Representatives. I have zero interest in telling anyone how to vote, but I would like to help any interested parties figure out where the incumbent in their district stands in terms of ideology and overall congressional leadership relative to other House members. Knowing this information might, at the very least, help a given voter to know whether the incumbent in their district is performing they way they want them to perform. I'm also going to use this as an opportunity to demonstrate how to use R (a great tool for doing an analysis like this) to determine where the incumbent in your congressional district stands relative to other House members. If you follow the steps outlined below (and if you download R and R Studio, ...

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to present some of my research at the 87th annual conference of the Indiana Academy of the Social Sciences. It was an amazing experience, and I was so thrilled that my fiancée and parents were able to come support me. The following is a shortened version of the paper I presented in a panel session alongside three other researchers who also discussed their own, very interesting, research projects: Introduction Evidence from numerous surveys over the years clearly shows that there is a growing chasm between Democrats and Republicans, not only ideologically, but also in terms of animosity.   At the same time, as we’ve traversed headlong into the digital age, social media use has increased exponentially.   While, according to more optimistic scholars, social media offers the promise of a public sphere where people with varying perspectives, ideologies, and ideas can engage in productive dialogue, the literature to d...