Edgar Franco-Vivanco

Edgar Franco-Vivanco

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Edgar Franco-Vivanco is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies. His research interests include Latin American politics, historical political economy, criminal violence, and indigenous politics.

Prof. Franco-Vivanco is interested in implementing machine learning tools to improve the analysis of historical data, in particular handwritten documents. He is also working in the application of text analysis to study indigenous languages. In a parallel research agenda, he explores how marginalized communities interact with criminal organizations and abusive policing in Latin America. As part of this research, he is using NLP tools to identify different types of criminal behavior.

Examples of the digitization process of handwritten documents from colonial Mexico.

Christopher Fariss

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My core research focuses on the politics and measurement of human rights, discrimination, violence, and repression. I use computational methods to understand why governments around the world torture, maim, and kill individuals within their jurisdiction and the processes monitors use to observe and document these abuses. Other projects cover a broad array of themes but share a focus on computationally intensive methods and research design. These methodological tools, essential for analyzing data at massive scale, open up new insights into the micro-foundations of state repression and the politics of measurement.

People rely more on strong ties for job help in countries with greater inequality. Coefficients from 55 regressions of job transmission on tie strength are compared to measures of inequality (Gini coefficient), mean income per capita, and population, all measured in 2013. Gray lines indicate 95% confidence regions from 1000 simulated regressions that incorporate uncertainty in the country-level regressions (see below for more details). In each simulated regression we draw each country point from the distribution of regression coefficients implied by the estimate and standard error for that country and measure of tie strength. P values indicate the simulated probability that there is no relationship between tie strength and the other variable. Laura K. Gee, Jason J. Jones, Christopher J. Fariss, Moira Burke, and James H. Fowler. “The Paradox of Weak Ties in 55 Countries” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 133:362-372 (January 2017) DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2016.12.004

Michael Traugott

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Michael Traugott, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Research Professor Emeritus, Center for Political Studies and Adjunct Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research.

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way news organizations employ them to cover campaigns and elections.

Jowei Chen

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Jowei Chen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Chen holds a secondary appointment in the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research.

Prof. Chen’s research focuses on political geography and political institutions in the United States. His work on legislative districts examines how the geography of Democrat and Republican voters, as well as the political manipulation of district boundaries, affects voters’ political representation in legislatures. This work uses individual-level and precinct-level data about elections, combined with computer simulations of the district-drawing process. Other research projects analyze the political composition of the federal workforce by analyzing the campaign contributions and partisanship of bureaucratic employees, linking employee records with voter registration records and campaign finance data.

 

 

Brian Min

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Brian Min, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Min holds secondary appointments as Research Associate Professor in the Center for Political Studies and the Institute for Social Research.

Prof. Min studies the political economy of development with an emphasis on distributive politics, public goods provision, and energy politics. His research uses high-resolution satellite imagery to study the distribution of electricity across and within the developing world. He has collaborated closely with the World Bank using satellite technologies and statistical algorithms to monitor electricity access in India and Africa, including the creation of a web platform to visualize twenty years of change in light output for every village in India (http://nightlights.io).

 

min-nightlights

Joseph Ryan

Joseph Ryan

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Joseph Ryan, PhD, is Associate Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work and Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies, ISR, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Prof. Ryan’s research and teaching build upon his direct practice experiences with child welfare and juvenile justice populations. Dr. Ryan is the Co-Director of the Child and Adolescent Data, an applied research center focused on using big data to drive policy and practice decisions in the field. Dr. Ryan is currently involved with several studies including a randomized clinical trial of recovery coaches for substance abusing parents in Illinois (AODA Demonstration), a foster care placement prevention study for young children in Michigan (MiFamily Demonstration), a Pay for Success (social impact bonds) study focused on high risk adolescents involved with the Illinois child welfare and juvenile justice system and a study of the educational experiences of youth in foster care (Kellogg Foundation Education and Equity). Dr. Ryan is committed to building strong University and State partnerships that utilize big data and data visualization tools to advance knowledge and address critical questions in the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice.

Walter Mebane

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My primary project, election forensics, concerns using statistical analysis to try to determine whether election results are accurate.  Election forensics methods use data about voters and votes that are as highly disaggregated as possible.  Typically this means polling station (precinct) data, sometimes ballot box data.  Data can comprises hundreds of thousands or millions of observations.  Geographic information is used, with geographic structure being relevant.  Estimation involves complex statistical models.  Frontiers include:  distinguishing frauds from effects of strategic behavior;  estimating frauds probabilities for individual observations (e.g., polling stations);  adjoining nonvoting data such as from in-person election observations.

Josh Pasek

Josh Pasek

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Josh Pasek is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, and a MIDAS Associate Director.  His substantive research explores how new media and psychological processes each shape political attitudes, public opinion, and political behaviors.  Josh also examines issues in the measurement of public opinion including techniques for incorporating social trace data as a means of tracking attitudes and behaviors.  Current research evaluates whether the use of online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter might be changing the political information environment, and assesses the conditions under which nonprobability samples, such as those obtained from big data methods or samples of Internet volunteers can lead to conclusions similar to those of traditional probability samples.  His work has been published in Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Communication Research, and the Journal of Communication among other outlets.  He also maintains two R packages for producing survey weights (anesrake) and analyzing weighted survey data (weights).