Political Science News

Faculty Lecturer Spencer Kiesel and recent Ph.D. graduate Sharif Amlani have published an article in PLOS ONE that introduces a new measure for affect that captures the motivation underpinning partisans’ attitudes. The new measure asks respondents for one-word to describe voters in their party and the opposing party. Then respondents code the sentiment behind their word choice themselves. This two-part measure produces qualitative and quantitative measures of respondents’ affect.

Assistant Professor Juan Tellez was awarded the UC Davis Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award, recognizing faculty who provide outstanding service in advising and mentoring at the program level. Congratulations, Professor Tellez!

Political Science Professor & Co-Chair Ethan Scheiner’s latest book, Freedom to Win: A Cold War Story of the Courageous Hockey Team That Fought the Soviets for the Soul of Its People—And Olympic Gold, was one of just eight nonfiction books listed among the University of California’s “Notable UC books of 2024,” which highlights “some of the year’s most critically acclaimed works, including National Book Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestsellers and Oprah picks, all from UC alums or faculty.” ht

This summer, PhD candidate Ally Lazar was selected as a RAND summer associate. She spent the summer in the Defense and Political Science section of RAND, working on a project in the Arroyo Center (RAND Army Research Division). This work builds on Ally's broader research interests of international security, political violence, and terrorism. https://www.rand.org/jobs/summer-associates/cohort-2024.html

PhD alumni Carlos Algara (Assistant Professor, Claremont Graduate University) and Jonathan Colner (Faculty Fellow, NYU) each co-authored an article as part a PS: Political Science & Politics journal symposium on the 2024 presidential election. Their models were the only ones in the symposium to correctly forecast former President Trump taking both the electoral college and popular vote.

Ph.D. Candidate Alice Malmberg has published an article in Election Law Journal where she assesses the effects on the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) on electoral backsliding across the American states. Check out the article here <https://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2023.0052> and coverage on Rick Hasen's Election Law blog here <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146878>.

PhD candidate Miley Liu recently launched a python package called PoliPrompt that streamlines the process of text classification using LLMs, addressing some of the key limitations researchers face in this domain. PoliPrompt uses automatic prompt optimization to significantly improve the accuracy and scalability of LLM classification tasks while reducing the manual effort required from researchers. You can find the package on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/PoliPrompt/

Professor Josephine Andrews and PhD candidate Yu-Shiuan Huang have co-authored an article, “Winners, Losers, and Affective Polarization,” in Party Politics. They analyze the winner-loser gap in affective polarization and find that winners’ affective polarization is significantly greater than losers’, and the difference is due to winners’ consistently higher in-party favoritism. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13540688241292556