Efficient facilitation in online deliberative settings

As online deliberative platforms become more prevalent, we are investigating how to make sure that discussions and decision-making processes in these digital environments are productive and reflect the full range of perspectives. In partnership with two digital deliberative platforms, CrownShy's Comhairle and Harmonica, we are testing interventions to improve user engagement and decision quality. This project is part of Mozilla Foundation's Democracy x AI cohort.

Work in progress

Segregation metrics

We are developing and testing a new network-based metric to measure racial segregation and compare its performance to well-established metrics such as the dissimilarity index and Moran's I.

Work in progress

Unmasking partisanship: Polarization undermines public response to collective risk

Maria Milosh, Marcus Painter, Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin L. Wright. Journal of Public Economics, 2021.

We show that political partisanship strongly predicted mask use in the United States (regardless of where local policy mandated it!), illustrating how political identity can impede responses to shared risks.

Paper · Washington Post · VoxEU

Hong Kong Protests Dataset, 2019–20

A granular geospatial archive of crowdsourced protest activity, available through Harvard Dataverse. See description on Medium.

Russian Anti-Corruption Protests on Social Media, 2017–18

An aggregated and anonymized archive of anti-government protest event pages on VK.