Welcome! I am a computational social scientist. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. I received my PhD in Political Science and MS in Statistical Science from Duke University in December 2019. My substantive research focuses on political behavior and political communication under both authoritarian and democratic contexts. My methodological research focuses on machine learning methods (particularly Bayesian statistical learning) for text and network data from social media.

Bail, Christopher A., Lisa P. Argyle, Taylor W. Brown, John P. Bumpus, Haohan Chen, M.B. Fallin Hunzaker, Jaemin Lee, Marcus Mann, Friedolin Merhout, and Alexander Volfovsky. 2018. “Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 37: 9216–9221. Link. PDF.
Media: NYTimes, Washington Post, LATimes, BBC
Winner of APSA Political Communication Section Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award, September 2019.

Chen, Haohan, and Herbert Kitschelt. Forthcoming. “Political Linkage Strategies and Social Investment Policies: Clientelism and Educational Policy in the Developing World.” The World Politics of Social Investment, Volume 1, edited by Bruno Palier and Silja Haeusermann. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paper

Dissertation Project

Chen, Haohan. “The Social Dynamics of Preference Falsification: Evidence from Anonymous Social Media Posting in China.”

Chen, Haohan. “Embedding Concepts and Documents in One Space: A System for Valid and Replicable Text-as-data Measurement.” Paper

Chen, Haohan. “Bayesian Dynamic Network Modeling for Streaming Social Media Political Talk.” Paper

Other Working Papers

Chen, Haohan. “Why the Poor Tolerate Inequality in Developing Democracies: Weak States and Clientelism.” Awarded Annual Best Prelim Exam Paper in Political Science, Duke University, 2017. Paper

Chen, Haohan, and Brian Guay. “Angry Birds: Measuring and Predicting Affective Polarization Online Using Survey-linked Twitter Data.” Presented at the International Methods Colloquium, July, 2020. Video

Chen, Haohan, and Ruodan Zhang. “Identifying Nonprofits by Scaling Mission and Activity with Word Embedding.” Unser Review. Paper

Zhang, Ruodan, Haohan Chen, and Jill Nicholson-Crotty. “A New Bureaucratic Effect: Does government funding to public charities crowd out or crowd in volunteers?” R&R.

Experiences at Duke Political Science
Lab Instructor and TA: Probability and Regression,* Fall 2018. Handouts and Code
Lab Instructor and TA: Advanced Regression,* Spring 2018. Handouts and Code
Instructor: Methods Bootcamp for first-year graduate students, Summer 2014, Summer 2015. LaTeX Tutorial
TA: Business, Politics, and Economic Growth, Spring 2017. Syllabus

* Graduate methods course

Experiences at Duke Statistical Science
TA: Probability (undergraduate course for statistics majors), Fall 2017.

Experiences in Computational Social Science
TA: Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, Summer 2018. Program Website

Mind Maps of Political Economy

Below are mind maps summarizing a selection of important topics of political economy. I drew them when I reviewed the literature for my qualifying exam in 2015.

Preference Formation
Market, Growth, and Development
Electoral Politics
Political Economy of Geography
Microeconomics: Trade-off and Behavioral Economics