Oxford Computational Political Science Group

Research Programme:
OCPSG aims to transform Oxford into a research hub for computational political science by fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and offering first-hand research opportunities. Our Research Programme works on replications of existing research, visualizations of key political science topics, critiques of methodologies or computational method applications of existing research, and also original research projects.

Our Research Programme features students and young researchers holding degrees from or currently studying at Oxford (Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, School of Geography and the Environment) or in other leading universities, such as Cambridge, LSE, UCL, Edinburgh, Essex, Yale, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, HKU, and CUHK. Their backgrounds range from political science to international relations, geography, public health, biology, history, Chinese studies, engineering, sociology, philosophy, economics, and data science.

• Project 1, led by Thomas Brailey, focuses on developing a fine-grained geospatial measure of coercive state capacity. It combines geolocated survey data, geospatial data, and road data. Using this measure of military, police, and security apparatus reach, this project investigates the relationship between state capacity and various outcomes like attitudes toward violence and instances of private violence.

   

• Project 2, led by Calvin Cheng, focuses on addressing key gaps in current research on the moral contagion effect. It aims to test this effect within the context of online information diffusion. It focuses on developing automated methods to measure morality in textual data and investigating how moral content spreads and influences behaviour on social media, using innovative causal research designs to account for confounding factors.

   

• Project 3, led by Zihao Zhang, focuses on working on mapping the political communication landscape in simplified Chinese on foreign platforms. It focuses on discovering ideological categories in politics-related posts and classifying key opinion leaders (KOLs) based on their posting contents using natural language processing techniques and mapping the information networks of KOLs based on common followers using social network analysis.