2024
In the 2023-2024 academic year, DDSS provided funding for 20 projects. We received applications from, and made awards to, a wide range of academic departments and centers across the University, including the Center for Information Technology Policy, Economics, Politics, the Office of Population Research, Psychology, Sociology, and the School of Public and International Affairs. DDSS awarded funds to 4 faculty projects, 9 projects led by graduate students, and 7 projects led by postdoctoral fellows or professional researchers.
Funded small grant proposals
The Politics of Agency Enforcement: Evidence from 564,000 Enforcement Actions
Researcher: Reilly Steel (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
ChatGPT-Empowered Automated Cross-Country Data Collection on Tax Policies
Researcher: Simone Paci (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: Politics
Calculating Economic Segregation in the United States
Researcher: Selene Campion (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: SPIA
Congressional Funding and Public Opinion: Emerging Technology Acquisition
Researcher: Austen Boroff (PhD Graduate Student)
Dept: SPIA
Scientification of Politics? The Strategic Use of Science by Bureaucrats
Researcher: Dahyun Choi (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
A Global Dataset on the Establishment and Design at Special Economic Zones (SEZs)
Researcher: Zoe Xincheng Ge (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: SPIA
Mapping Organize Crime and Human Trafficking in Peru
Researcher: Maria Micaela Sviatschi (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Leveraging Experimental Techniques to Understand Sexual Misconduct in Religious Organizations
Researcher: Carrie Siegler (Graduate Student)
Dept: Sociology
A Dataset on Civil Society Organizations in International Human Rights Institutions
Researcher: Gino Pauselli (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Dept: SPIA
Partners for Sales? Chinese Economic Statecraft and Military Diplomacy
Researcher: Zenobia Chan (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
Descriptive Diversity, Intersectionality, and Support for Foreign Aid: Evidence from South Africa
Researcher: Rikio Inouye (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
Measuring Strategic Alignment
Researcher: Ethan Kapstein (Lecturer with rank of Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Funded large (>$5k) grant proposals
Effect of Chatbot Technology on Human Social Health
Researcher: Rose Guingrich (Graduate Student)
Dept: Psychology & Social Policy
Designing Smart Environments to Augment Collective Learning and Creativity
Researcher: Dalton Conley (Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology)
Dept: Sociology
The Value of Democracy in Low- and Middle-income Countries
Researcher: Carles Boix (Professor of Politics and Public Affairs)
Dept: SPIA
Exchange Controls and the Segmentation of International Currency Markets
Researcher: Victor Degorce (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: SPIA
The Impact of Corporate Landlords on the Structure of the Residential Rental Market
Researcher: Eunsung Yoon (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: Sociology
Uncovering Mechanisms Leading to Violence Against Civilians in African Countries Collaborating with the Russian Wagner Group
Researcher: Zoë Gorman (Graduate Student)
Dept: SPIA
Sample Complexity Bounds: A New Approach to Sample Size Calculation in the Social Sciences
Researcher: Narrelle Gilchrist (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
WhatsApp Watch
Researcher: Surya Mattu (Data Scientist)
Dept: Center for Information Technology Policy
2023
In the 2022-2023 academic year, DDSS provided funding for 16 projects. We received applications from, and made awards to, a wide range of academic departments and centers across the University, including the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Computer Science, Economics, University Center for Human Values, Politics, the Office of Population Research, Psychology, Sociology, and the School of Public and International Affairs. DDSS awarded funds to 8 faculty projects, 5 projects led by graduate students, and 3 projects led by postdoctoral fellows or professional researchers.
Funded small grant proposals
Vertical and Horizontal Occupational Mobility in Organizations
Researcher: Hunter York (Graduate Student)
Dept: Sociology
Statistically Analyzing the Language of the Federal Reserve Board
Researcher: Denis Peskoff (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: Office of Population Research
Intra-party Competition and Candidate Selection - Evidence from Historical Data Collected via a Semi-automated OCR Workflow
Researcher: Thomas Tichelbaecker (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
National Database for Electoral Quotas in India
Researcher: Bhumi Purohit (Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow)
Dept: SPIA
Historical Data on Racial Strife in the US Military
Researcher: Christopher Blair (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Politics
Winogrande Sentences Comparing Humans and GPT4
Researcher: Adele Goldberg (Professor)
Dept: Psychology
Genomic Social Demography: Leveraging DNA to Explore the Dynamic Relationship Between Race and Ancestry in the United States
Researcher: Sam Trejo (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Funded large (>$5k) grant proposals
Making the Forms 990 Open Access: Unleashing Nonprofit Tax Data to Invigorate Social Science Research
Researcher: Kristopher Velasco (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Methods for the Analysis of High-Frequency Survey Data
Researcher: Jacob Tucker (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
The Measurement Validity of Topic Models in Social Science and Viable Alternatives
Researcher: Brandon Stewart (Associate Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Today's Laws and Yesterday's Animus
Researcher: Diag Davenport (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: SPIA
Religious Identity Choice: Evidence from a Billion Indian Names
Researcher: Tanushree Goyal (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Automating Classification of Moral Reasoning in Natural Language
Researcher: Molly Crockett (Associate Professor)
Dept: Psychology and University Center for Human Values
Proposal for an Experimental Research Infrastructure to Study Social Media Platforms
Researcher: William Schulz (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
Computational Analysis of Police Body-Worn Camera Footage
Researcher: Brandon Stewart (Associate Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Exploring the Social Construction of Value in Blockchain Systems
Researcher: Ari Dyckovsky (Graduate Student)
Dept: Psychology
2022
In the 2021-2022 academic year, DDSS provided funding to 19 projects across all social science departments, as well as the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Anthropology, the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), Computer Science, the Office of Population Research (OPR), Psychology, Sociology, the School of Public and International Affairs.This included the funding of 8 small-scale grants and 11 large-scale grants. Funded projects involved over 9 faculty members, 6 graduate students, and 4 postdoctoral fellows or professional researchers.
Funded small grant proposals
Costly Protest Actions Help Social Movements Overcome Motivated Skepticism
Researcher: Benjamin Crisman (Grad Student)
Dept: Politics
Investigating How Online Platforms Shape the Politically Sensible
Researcher: Orestis Papakyriakopoulos (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Dept: Center for Information Technology Policy
Building a Video Database of Caregiver-Infant Interactions in the United States and Kenya
Researcher: Jessica Kosie (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Dept: Psychology
Gender in the Journals: A Dataset of Gender and Politics Research
Researcher: Carolyn Barnett (Grad Student)
Dept: Politics
Progress for Whom? Analyzing How LGBTQ Legal Victories Influence U.S. Anti-LGBTQ Organizations’ Foreign Expenditures
Researcher: Kristopher Velasco (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Russian State Propaganda Narratives Surrounding the War in Ukraine
Researcher: Isabelle DeSisto (Grad Student)
Dept: Politics
The Role of Stereotypes in Machine Learning
Researcher: Angelina Wang (Grad Student)
Dept: Computer Science
Dynamic Estimates of Survey Question Answers Using Publicly Available Social Media Data
Researcher: Grigore Pop-Eleches (Professor)
Dept: Politics
Funded large (>$5k) grant proposals
Rally: An Open Platform for Large-scale Browser-based Studies on Technology and Society Problems
Researcher: Jonathan Mayer (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Quantifying Informative Signals from Political Texts
Researcher: Dahyun Choi (Grad Student)
Dept: Politics
Financialization and the Politics of Housing Crises
Researcher: Andreas Wiedemann (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Digital Methods to Map Stakeholder Influence on Climate Policy Discourse in India
Researcher: Pooja Ramamurthi (Grad Student)
Dept: SPIA
Designing Climate Change Resiliency in Princeton, NJ
Researcher: Carolyn Rouse (Ritter Professor Anthropology)
Dept: Anthropology
Ruling the Unruly Citizenry in Dictatorships? The Rise of Police Moral Propaganda on Chinese TikTok
Researcher: Xu Xu (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Financial Frictions and Misallocation of Innovation
Researcher: Adrien Matray (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Economics
Uncovering Climate Change Narratives Across US Labor Coalitions: A Longitudinal Analysis of Multi-sector Union Discourse
Researcher: Holly Caggiano (Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow)
Dept: Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Lemons in the Political Marketplace: A Big-data Approach to Detect ‘Scam PACs’
Researcher: Zhao Li (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Developing New Tools for Measuring Emotions and Self-awareness
Researcher: Haran Sened (Visiting Fellow)
Dept: Psychology
Building a Dataset of Web Browsing and Social Media Activity for the 2022 U.S. Election Cycle
Researcher: Jonathan Mayer (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Computer Science and Princeton
2021
In the 2020-2021 academic year, DDSS provided funding to 27 projects across all social science departments, as well as the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), Computer Science, Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE), and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. This included the funding of 17 small-scale grants and 10 large-scale grants. Funded projects involved over 12 faculty members, 12 graduate students, and 3 postdoctoral fellows or professional researchers.
Funded small grant proposals
Decoding Subnational Propaganda Strategies in China
Researcher: Xiaoxiao Shen (PhD student, Rory Truex, advisor)
Dept: Politics
Mobility Effects of Immigration Restriction: Evidence from Chinese Exclusion
Researcher: Hannah Postel (PhD Student)
Dept: SPIA
The Impact of Discrimination on Coalition-Building: Asian Americans in the Era of COVID-19
Researcher: Stephanie Chan, Sonya Chen (PhD Students, Dara Strolovitch, advisor)
Dept: Politics
The Emergence of Polarized Social Networks via Information Cascades
Researcher: Chris Tokita (PhD Student, Andrew Guess, Corina Tarnita, advisor)
Dept: Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Fixing for the Future with Lessons of the Past: The Determinants of Effective Foreign Policy Reform
Researcher: Ryan Dukeman (PhD Student, Prof. G. John Ikenberry, advisor)
Dept: Politics
The Zillow Effect: Public School Ratings and Residential Place Discrimination
Researcher: Adam Goldstein (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Sociology
Public Beliefs and Marriage Formation: Evidence From Online Experiments
Researcher: Daniela Urbina Julio (Graduate Student, Dalton Conley, advisor)
Dept: Sociology
Partisan Polarization and Support for Democratic Norms
Researcher: Rory Truex (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Politics
How Civic Education Can Shape Political Engagement
Researcher: Claire Willeck (Graduate student, Tali Mendelberg, advisor)
Dept: Politics
Investigating the Effect of Non-state Endorsements on Individuals' Receptiveness to State Media in China
Researcher: Hannah Waight (PhD Student, Brandon Stewart, Eliot Chen, Yan Bennett, advisors)
Dept: Sociology
From Pluribus to Unum: Statebuilding in 19th Century America
Researcher: Melissa M. Lee (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Politics
Dallas: Connecting Economic and Social Life in a Network of Elite Families, 1890-1950
Researcher: Shay O’Brien (Graduate Student)
Dept: Sociology
Dept: Politics
Characteristics of Political Discourse in Social Media
Researcher: Amy Winecoff (Data Scientist)
Dept: Center for Information Technology Policy
Spatial Inequality and Policy Mismatch: Measuring Party Positions Through Digital Political Advertising
Researcher: Andreas Wiedemann (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Black Political Empowerment and Incarceration in the Postbellum American South
Researcher: Susanne Schwarz (Graduate Student, Paul Frymer, advisor)
Dept: Politics
Pilot Chat Experiments with ReChat
Researcher: William S. Schulz (Graduate Student)
Dept: Politics
Identifying Propaganda: Holdout Validation and Extrapolation
Researcher: Hannah Waight (PhD Student, Brandon Stewart, Margaret Roberts, Yin Yuan)
Dept: Sociology
Funded large (>$5K) grant proposals
Partisan Polarization and Support for Democratic Norms
Researcher: Rory Truex (Assistant Professor)
Dept: Politics
Understanding Successful Social Interactions
Researcher: Lily Tsoi (Post Doc Research Fellow)
Dept: Psychology
Information Overload and Dynamic Judgment in High-speed Politics
Researcher: Markus Prior (Professor)
Dept: Politics
Building a Large-scale, Cross-Cultural Dataset to Advance Theory and Methods in Infant Cognition
Researcher: Casey Lew-Williams (Professor)
Dept: Psychology
A Multi-country Database of Income Dynamics and Inequality
Researcher: Gianluca Violante (Professor)
Dept: Economics
The Person Project: A Dynamic Platform for Large-scale Social Science
Researcher: Stacey Sinclair (Professor)
Dept: Psychology
Computational Analysis of Police Body-Worn Camera Footage
Researcher: Jonathan Mummolo (Assistant Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Follow the Money: Tracking Monetization of COVID-Misinformation
Researcher: Jacob Shapiro (Professor)
Dept: SPIA
Pushing the Boundaries With Video Data
Researcher: Thomas Espenshade (Professor, Emeritus. Senior Scholar), Jeffrey Himpele (Director, Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab, Lecturer)
Dept: Sociology, Anthropology
Rally: An Open Platform for Large-scale Browser-based Studies on Technology and Society Problems
Researcher: Jonathan Mayer (Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Public Affairs)
Dept: SPIA
2020
In the 2019-2020 academic year, DDSS provided funding to 32 projects across all social science departments, as well as Computer Science, ORFE, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. This included the funding of 20 small-scale grants and 12 large-scale grants. Funded projects involving over 30 faculty members, 13 graduate students, and 10 postdoctoral fellows or professional researchers.
Funded small grant proposals
Incorporating Context into a Computational Similarity Measure: Introducing Relative Relevant Cosine (RCC)
Researcher: Adele Goldberg (Professor)
Affiliated Department: Psychology
The Politics of Consumption
Researcher: Jacob Shapiro (Professor)
Affiliated Department: SPIA/Politics
The Social Consequences of Foreign Capital Liberalization
Researcher: Adrien Matray (Assistant Professor)
Affiliated Department: Economics
Bridging Divides Initiative: Patterns of Increased Risk of Political Violence Ahead of the 2020 Elections
Researcher: Nealin Parker (Professional Specialist and Lecturer)
Affiliated Department: SPIA
Social Media and Election Outcomes
Researcher: Karsten Mueller (Postdoctoral research associate)
Affiliated Department: SPIA
The Political Economy of Convict Leasing in the Postbellum American South
Researcher: Susanne Schwarz (Graduate student – Paul Frymer, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Politics
Can Civics Teaching Methods Increase Political Participation?
Researcher: Claire Willeck (Graduate student – Tali Mendelberg, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Politics
Effects of Diversity Pipeline Programs on Doctorates’ Academic Career Outcomes and Scientific Outputs
Researcher: Janet Xu (Graduate student – Matt Salganik, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Sociology
Decoding Subnational Propaganda Strategies in China
Researcher: Xiaoxiao Shen (Graduate student – Rory Truex, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Politics
Creation of Data Set Examining U.S. Budget Processes
Researcher: Patricia Kirkland (Assistant Professor)
Affiliated Department: SPIA
Panel Dataset of Criminal Group Presence in Mexican Municipalities
Researcher: Patrick Signoret (Graduate student – Jake Shapiro, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Politics
Public Beliefs and Marriage Formation: Evidence from Online Experiments
Researcher: Daniela Urbina Julio (Graduate Student – Dalton Conley, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Sociology
Transportation Infrastructure Networks, Political Institutions, and Polarization
Researcher: Leonard Wantchekon (Professor)
Affiliated Department: Politics
Intertemporal Choice During Crisis
Researcher: Tom Griffiths (Professor)
Affiliated Department: Psychology
Constructing the First Preposition-based Semantic Annotation of Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus
Researcher: Herrissa Lamothe (Graduate Student – Kim Scheppele, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Sociology
Social Norms Dynamics as a Complex Adaptive System
Researcher: Vitor Vasconcelos (Postdoctoral research associate)
Affiliated Department: SPIA
Mobility Effects of Immigration Restriction: Evidence from Chinese Exclusion
Researcher: Hannah Postel (Graduate Student – Leah Boustan, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Economics
Public Perceptions of State Performance: Evidence from Weibo Posts During the COVID-19 Crisis
Researcher: Lai Wei (Graduate Student); Elaine Yao (Graduate student – Dean Knox, advisor)
Affiliated Department: Sociology/Politics
Human Expertise vs. Data, Algorithms, and Computation: Understanding How Machine Learning Predictions Improve College Choice Decisions
Researcher: Xiaoyang Ye (Postdoctoral research associate)
Affiliated Department: SPIA
Digital Artifacts from Hong Kong Anti-extradition Bill Social Movement
Researcher: Robin Lee (Graduate Student); Lillian Leung (Graduate Student
Affiliated Department: Sociology
The Impact of Discrimination on Coalition-Building: Asian Americans in the Era of COVID-19
Researcher: Stephanie Chan, Sonya Chen (PhD Students); Dara Strolovitch, advisor
Affiliated Department: Politics
The Zillow Effect: Public School Ratings and Residential Place Discrimination
Researcher: Adam Goldstein (Assistant Professor)
Affiliated Department: Sociology
Fixing for the Future with Lessons of the Past: The Determinants of Effective Foreign Policy Reform
Researcher: Ryan Dukeman (PhD Student); G. John Ikenberry, advisor
Affiliated Department: Politics
Funded large (>$5K) grant proposals
New Developments in Synthetic Control Methods
Researcher: Matias Cattaneo (Professor), Rocio Titiunik (Professor)
Affiliated Department: ORFE, Politics
Understanding Attribution and Adaptive Behavior to Extreme Climatic Events: A Social-ecological-technical Systems Perspective
Researcher: Elke Weber (Professor), Simon Levin (Professor), Sara Constantino (Postdoc), Alicia Cooperman (Postdoc), Elisabeth Krueger(Postdoc), Vitor Vasconcelos (Postdoc)
Affiliated Department: SPIA, Andlinger Center, EEB, PIIRS, PEI
Pushing the Boundaries with Video Data
Researcher: Thomas Espenshade (Senior Scholar), Jeffrey Himpele (Director, Viz Lab; Lecturer)
Affiliated Department: Sociology, Anthropology
Historical Inequality and Long-term Development in Brazil
Researcher: Thomas Fujiwara (Associate Professor), Marcelo Medeiros (Visiting Professor), Miqueias Mugge (Associate Research Scholar)
Affiliated Department: Economics, PLAS, PIIRS
The Demobilizing Effects of Pretrial Incarceration
Researcher: Tali Mendelberg (Professor), Anne McDonough (Research Fellow), Ted Enamorado (UNC Chapel Hill)
Affiliated Department:Politics
The Content of Political Campaign Emails
Researcher: Arvind Narayanan (Professor), Brandon Stewart (Assistant Professor), Arunesh Mathur (Doctoral student), Carsten Schwemmer (Postdoc), Angelina Wang (Doctoral Student)
Affiliated Department: Computer Science, Sociology, CITP
Prejudice Reduction: Creating an Open Repository of “What Works” from Experimental Research
Researcher: Betsy Levy Paluck (Professor), Meghan Testerman (Librarian)
Affiliated Department: Psychology, SPIA, Library
Princeton Geniza Lab Historic Documents Database
Researcher: Marina Rustow (Professor)
Affiliated Department: History, Near Eastern Studies, Center for Digital Humanities
Methods and Data for Measuring Propaganda and Censorship in China
Researcher: Brandon Stewart (Assistant Professor), Dean Knox (Assistant Professor), Hannah Waight (Doctoral Student)
Affiliated Department: Sociology, Politics
Street Police Patrols and Crime Against Women in Public Spaces: Experimental Evidence from India
Researcher: Maria Micaela Sviatschi (Assistant Professor) and collaborators from UConn, Ifo Institute, World Bank
Affiliated Department: SPIA
The Person Project: A Research Platform for Large-scale Social Science
Researcher: Diana Tamir (Assistant Professor), Nicole Shelton (Professor), Stacey Sinclair (Professor), Nickolas Jones (Postdoctoral Research Associate)n
Affiliated Department: Psychology, PNI
After the Storm: Impact of Hurricanes on Employees and Firms in the U.S.
Researcher: Michael Oppenheimer (Professor), Rachel Young (Doctoral Student), Alice Tianbo Zhang (Postdoctoral Research Associate)
Affiliated Department: Geosciences, SPIA