Welcome! I’m a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. I co-direct the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center. I am also an affiliate at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. My research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship and propaganda in China.
I received a PhD from Harvard in Government (2014), MS from Stanford in Statistics (2009) and BA from Stanford in International Relations and Economics (2009). Much of my research uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of texts to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on access to information and beliefs about politics.
My first book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, was listed as one of the Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2018, was honored with the Goldsmith Book Award, and has been awarded the Best Book Award in the Human Rights Section and Information Technology and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. I am honored to hold a Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair at UCSD.
Research
Books
Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences (2022, Princeton University Press) with Justin Grimmer and Brandon Stewart. From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science research design to develop and evaluate new insights.
Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China's Great Firewall (2018, Princeton University Press) describes how incomplete and porous censorship in China have an impact on information consumption in China, even when censorship is easy to circumvent. Using new methods to measure the influence of censorship and propaganda, I present a theory that explains how censorship impacts citizens' access to information and in turn why authoritarian regimes decide to use different types of censorship in different circumstances to control the spread of information.
Working Papers
Waight, Hannah, Yin Yuan, Margaret E. Roberts and Brandon M. Stewart. "Speaking with the State’s Voice: The Decade-Long Growth of Government-Authored News Media in China under Xi Jinping." (2024)
Published Papers
Forthcoming
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
Related Writings
Software
The Structural Topic Model: R package stm for estimating the Structural Topic Model.
The Structural Topic Model Browser: R package stmBrowser for visualizing the Structural Topic Model.
Teaching
Current Teaching