Andrew O’Donohue, "The Court of Public Opinion: How Competing Rhetoric about Trump's Prosecution Affects Political Attitudes"
Abstract
Prosecutions of political leaders may have double-edged effects on public opinion. While legal interventions may turn public opinion against law-breaking politicians, prosecutions may also increase support for the accused leader and encourage his supporters to seek retaliation. Crucially, political elites seek to persuade citizens with competing framings of political prosecutions. Whereas legal officials...
Anton Strezhnev (UChicago), "A Guide to Dynamic Difference-in-Differences Regressions for Political Scientists"
Abstract
Difference-in-differences (DiD) designs for estimating causal effects have grown in popularity throughout political science. Many DiD papers present their central results through an "event study" plot - a visualization that combines estimated dynamic average treatment effects for multiple post-treatment time periods alongside placebo tests of the main identifying assumption: parallel trends. Despite their...
Charles Angelucci (MIT), "Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election" (w/Michel Gutmann and Andrea Prat)
Abstract
We use a large-scale news knowledge survey conducted just before the 2020 US presidential election, alongside monthly survey data, to explore how partisan differences in political news beliefs evolve. We exploit questions repeated in multiple surveys to identify changes in beliefs about the same news stories as the election approaches. Our findings indicate that partisan bias intensifies two to threefold during election periods. Within a framework of motivated beliefs, this change in partisan bias is predominantly driven by an amplification of the partisan identity effect, rather than differences in partisan recall. We also present findings from a counterfactual analysis that assesses the impact of a hypothetical targeted misinformation campaign during and outside of elections. ... Read more about Charles Angelucci (Alesina Seminar)
The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.
The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.