Aaron Kaufman

Aaron Kaufman received his PhD in Political Methodology and American Politics from Harvard University in April 2019. His research interests leverage cutting-edge methods in computer science and causal inference to answer substantive questions about public opinion, voting patterns, and elite behavior. Additionally, he produces open-source tools to help survey researchers conduct more efficient and unbiased research. He is committed to research transparency and open science.

In his dissertation, he builds, tests, and experimentally validates a computational model to estimate partisanship from free text. He extends this model to predict the relative biases of public opinion survey questions and shows that voters respond predictably to texts with varying bias. Furthermore, he shows that survey firms have consistently trended toward writing more conservative questions over the past two decades.

Education:

BA University of California, Berkeley; AM Harvard University; PhD Harvard University

Research Areas:

Computational Social Science; Data Science; American Politics

Courses Taught

• BUSOR-UH 2002 Business and Technology
• BUSOR-UH 2004 Statistics and Data Analytics: Business
• CS-UH 4001 Capstone Project in Computer Science 1
• CS-UH 4002 Capstone Project in Computer Science 2
• POLSC-UH 2211 Data Analysis