The Harvard Data Science Initiative is pleased to announce support for two new faculty research projects that address pressing challenges in political science and policy evaluation.
Measuring Partisan Gerrymandering in State Legislatures
Kosuke Imai, Professor of Government and of Statistics, seeks to develop new computational methods to quantify the extent of partisan gerrymandering in state legislative districts across the U.S. While past research has largely focused on congressional redistricting, this project fills a critical gap by addressing gerrymandering at the state level, where many policy decisions and redistricting rules originate.
Building on the team’s prior work using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) simulation methods, the project will generalize their algorithm to handle the significantly larger scale of state legislative maps. The team will also collect and analyze new datasets, including state-specific redistricting rules, precinct-level electoral results, and geographic shapefiles. This effort is part of the larger ALARM Project, founded by Professor Imai, which advances empirical approaches to redistricting in the U.S. and globally.
Learn more about Professor Imai’s research.
External Validity and Generalizability in Policy Evaluation
Davide Viviano, Assistant Professor of Economics, is improving how researchers and policymakers understand the generalizability of policy interventions across different populations and settings. With the increasing use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods, a central question is: when can results from one context be used to inform decisions in another?
This project introduces new statistical tools to distinguish between effects that are broadly generalizable and those that are context-specific or unpredictable. These tools will help identify where current evidence is sufficient to support scaling policies, and where more targeted research is necessary. Applications span a range of domains—from microcredit to vaccine uptake—and the project will generate new working papers and open-source software for use by practitioners and researchers alike.
Learn more about Professor Viviano’s research.
Both projects are supported through the HDSI Faculty Special Projects Fund.