The Latin American Elections Hub (LATAM-EH) aims to enhance dialogue between the U.S. audience—particularly in Michigan and the Midwest—and Latin America. To achieve this, the hub organizes panels to discuss the most significant elections in the region, their relevance to the U.S., and the associated democratic risks. LATAM-EH also seeks to create a network of experts in the Latin American electoral landscape who can provide data-driven, model-oriented analysis to journalists and policymakers in the U.S. Each year, the hub partners with the class Politics and Society in Latin America (POLSCI 347) and with different centers at the University of Michigan to analyze the major elections in the region. In the class, students examine candidates, their profiles and policies, and engage with regional experts.
The four-year project, “Cohesion under Crisis: Concepts, Measures, Implications,” will investigate the role of social cohesion in weathering crisis, focusing on the Indo-Pacific region: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
Leveraging the skills of a team of researchers across multiple institutions, the project will develop and assess a new conceptual framework for studying social cohesion that accounts for complex social dynamics and changing contexts.
The researchers will investigate how social cohesion varies regionally and over time, and what factors support or undermine cohesion. They will also report on the tradeoffs for using different measurement and data collection strategies in the region, helping identify best practices for research that must balance accuracy with cost effectiveness.
Hicken will oversee the project team that includes Dan Slater, James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and also an affiliate of the Center for Political Studies; Thomas Pepinsky, Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government at Cornell University, and Anil Menon, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced.
This is a pilot project to provide enhanced access to two seminal social science data resources – the American National Election Studies (ANES) and General Social Survey (GSS) – by creating structured, machine-actionable metadata and a portal populated with new tools for data discovery and analysis. The project will also analyze the current workflows that produce the ANES and GSS data and make recommendations for transitioning to metadata-driven processes to streamline data production and guard against the metadata loss that currently occurs.
xSub is a repository of micro-level, subnational event data on armed conflict and contention around the world. Our goal is to preserve and consolidate multiple open-source data collections in one comprehensive electronic archive, creating a “database of databases” for purposes of research, education, policy-making and evaluation.
The archive currently includes data on armed conflict and contention from 195 countries (1968-2019), from 22 event data sources, including both large data collections and individual scholars. The data are available as individual events, and as analysis-ready spatial panel datasets. To facilitate comparisons across countries and sources, xSub organizes these data into common units of analysis, by space (country, province, district, grid cell, electoral constituency) and time (year, month, week, day). We also provide several pooled, multi-source versions of the data for every country.
The Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) has followed a national probability sample of 7th and 10th grade public school students for the last 25 years and is the largest and most comprehensive data set available to examine the factors that contribute to student and young adult interest in and understanding of science and technology. The LSAY is distinctive in its measurement of home, school, peer, and community variables over more than two decades, making it ideal for analyses that seek to understand the interaction between and among these factors.
The proposed workshop will include a combination of younger university- based scholars and data-focused program directors and managers from informal science learning institutions. Through the acquisition of the skills that will be provided in this workshop, workshop participants will be able to improve policy and the delivery of both formal and informal educational services throughout the nation. This is a cyclical process – the improvement of practice and theory based on LSAY data will generate additional scholarship which will eventually inform future practice. Bringing good data into the design and deliver of science education is a long-term investment in the quality of science education in the future.
This project organizes a one-day interdisciplinary workshop, to be held at NSF and attended by approximately ten faculty members from around the United States. The purpose of the workshop is to specify concretely how and where research on genetics, cognition, and social behavior will generate transformative scientific practices, scholarly infrastructure, and widely relevant findings of high social value. Workshop participants will be invited to evaluate the contributions to date of such research in their field so as to clarify the kinds of “next steps” in the near term (i.e., five to ten years) that are likely to provide high-value outcomes. The workshop will devote special attention to scientific endeavors whose implications speak directly to the Political Science program’s areas of interest.
This project addresses two primary gaps in knowledge: insufficient practical solutions for improving the lives of marginalized groups in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and a skills gap facing junior Arab social scientists in MENA that limits their ability to produce rigorous, data-based, problem-focused research at the highest levels.
This works fills these two critical gaps by bringing together junior researchers with the goal of helping them develop a research project into marginalized communities in MENA. A key element will be a newly-designed syllabus developed by the project leaders that will include readings, exercises, and problem sets designed to help participants understand the rigorous research process more fully, beginning with translating important issues and problems into researchable puzzles and, thereafter, to engage theory, develop testable hypotheses, determine the procedures by which these hypotheses will be tested, collect the necessary data, and carry out the analysis of these data. Additionally, the workshops will help the scholars consider publication strategies, including in academic papers, policy forums, and to the media more broadly.
This research will study human and machine co-curation of online news feeds and develop new software to compare the user’s intent with respect to idealized feed curation, when algorithms filter what appears in online news feeds. This will be combined with research that investigates the user’s perception of the algorithm’s actions and the user’s perceptions of feed settings in control panels. Not only are these algorithmic processes opaque to most users, but many users don’t even know that algorithms are making decisions on their behalf. People who might be aware of algorithmic processes at work have no way to verify their existence; changes in a user’s search results, for example, might have resulted from a change in the algorithm, or from a change in the user’s activity. This work has the potential to increase public algorithm awareness that may lead to more in-depth exploration and possibly to learning about algorithms, with implications for the public understanding of science and technology.
The research stages in this project will generate evidence-based knowledge in five main areas: (a) the level of social media algorithm awareness across a general population, (b) how awareness levels and interaction behavior change when exposed to facets of social feeds via an interactive social feed visualization tool, (c) whether the use of feed settings result in better feed perception, (d) what people want to see in their feeds, and (e) how we can communicate algorithmic process through design of feed content and feed interfaces. The outcomes of this work will help researchers and practitioners in various fields (Human Computer Interaction, Social Science, Design, Engineering, Law, Ethics) critically rethink current computation and design practice and lead to interfaces that help people understand the algorithms that shape their lives.
This project’s central aim is the training of the next generation of international social scientists. Working in conjunction with the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia, there have been three major components to the program: the placement of young scholars from the European University at Russian regional universities, various efforts to “network” between and among the regional universities, the European University, and the University of Michigan; and a University of Michigan program of training young scholars from the European University.
For the 1.3 billion people estimated to lack electricity around the world, the World Bank plays a critical role in financing rural electrification and lighting improvement projects. While these projects are regularly monitored and evaluated, no mechanism exists to track the sustainability and effectiveness of electrification projects after books are closed or monitoring teams have left. We propose a novel strategy to monitor the effectiveness of rural electrification projects using low-cost satellite imagery of nighttime lights, which can detect small concentrations of outdoor lighting in all parts of the globe, every single night. Our plan seeks to validate this approach through parallel data collection from the sky and on the ground in a varied set of villages across Africa and Asia, establishing the contexts in which satellite analysis can enhance the Bank’s monitoring and evaluation efforts. By introducing validated satellite-based methodology to monitor rural electrification, our tools will enable better tracking of project implementation and selection of new project sites, while providing maps and imagery to enhance transparency and communication results to clients and citizens.