Jan Zilinsky

Computational social scientist & post-doctoral research fellow

I study how citizens organize and process economic and political information.

Core research interests: Technology & Politics, Public Opinion, Text as Data and related methods. (Google Scholar)

Teaching

• Social Media and Conspiracy Theories (Winter 2021, Spring 2022)
• Political and Economic Persuasion (Winter 2021, Spring 2022)
• Note for prospective students & thesis writers.

Research

• Division Does Not Imply Predictability: Demographics Continue to Reveal Little About Voting and Partisanship. With Seo-young Silvia Kim.
  Pre-print | Code on Github | MPSA Slides | Podcast

• Geographic Boundaries Matter for Views of the Economy: Evidence from Administrative Data and Subjective Economic Evaluations. Conditionally Accepted at Political Analysis. With James Bisbee.

• Don’t Republicans Tweet Too? Using Twitter to Assess the Consequences of Political Endorsements by Celebrities. Perspectives on Politics, 2020. With Vaccari, C., Nagler, J. & Tucker, J. A. PDF | Monkey Cage summary

• Democratic deconsolidation revisited: Young Europeans are not dissatisfied with democracy. Research & Politics, 2019. PDF (open-access)

• How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media? Evidence from Linked Survey and Twitter Data. Sage Open, 2019. With Gregory Eady, Jonathan Nagler, Andrew Guess, and Joshua Tucker. PDF (open-access) | Summaries: Pacific Standard, Main chart

• The Happiness Gap in Eastern Europe. Journal of Comparative Economics, 2016. With Simeon Djankov and Elena Nikolova. PDF | Summary: Financial Times blog | Ungated SSRN & OSF pre-prints

Work in progress

• What Matters to Voters? Examining Micro-Level and Macro-Level Drivers of Citizens’ Economic and Life Evaluations. Project with James Bisbee. Preliminary results.

• What People Learn From Twitter: Evidence from a Panel Survey Combined with Direct Observation of Social Media Activity. Paper with Greogy Eady, Richard Bonneau, Joshua Tucker and Jonathan Nagler. MPSA Slides.

• Predicting Economic Evaluations. A methodological summary.

• “People Like Me Are Falling Behind:” Measuring Perceptions of Inequality Using Novel Survey Questions. Paper with Suzanna Linn, Jonathan Nagler, and Nathan Morse.

Other publications and links

• Affective polarization and belief in voter fraud. (Monkey Cage, January 2021)
  • Supplementary analysis
• Trump supporters who think he didn’t keep his promises are more likely to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. (Monkey Cage, October 2020)
• Explaining reactions to Tweets about the Squad (Washington Post, Monkey Cage analysis)
• Ideological estimation with Twitter data
  • Methodological supplement explaining approach.
• Fiscal tightening and economic growth (VoxEu.org)
• Article in Raising Lower-Level Wages: When and Why It Makes Economic Sense

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What does the academic literature say about the Trump 2016 victory? A list of relevant papers.