Data and politics are becoming more and more linked. Today's political campaigns and voter mobilization efforts are now fully focused on data. Voters, pollsters and elected officials rely on data to make choices that have local, regional and national impacts.
A Department of Political Science The course offers students tools to help give meaning to these choices and their results.
In class 17,831 (data and politics), students are initiated into the principles and practices necessary to understand the types of electoral and others. Taught by the Associate Professor of Political Science Daniel HidalgoStudents use real world data sets to explore subjects such as survey and prediction of elections, participation rate, voters targeting and changes in public opinion over time.
The course wants students to describe why and how the use of statistical data and methods has changed electoral policy, includes the basic principles of social science statistics and analyzing data using modern statistical IT tools. The Capstone course is an original project that involves the collection, analysis and interpretation of original survey data used in modern campaigns.
“I wanted to create a course applied and based on the practice that would appeal to undergraduate students and provide a basis for analysis, understanding and relationships on large data sets in politics,” explains Hidalgo, who redesigned the course for the spring of 2025.
Hidalgo, who also works in the Political methodology laboratory MIT, an investigation into the political economy of elections, campaigns and representation in the development of democracies, in particular in Latin America, as well as quantitative methods in the social sciences.
Politics and modernity
Influence and access to artificial intelligence and large languages make a course such as data and policy even more important, says Hidalgo. “You have to understand people on the other side of the data,” he says.
The course is also focused on the human element of politics, exploring conflicts, biases, their structures and their impacts while working to improve information control and coherent narration.
“The analysis and collection of data will never be perfect,” explains Hidalgo. “But to analyze and understand that holds ideas, and why, and using information to tell a coherent story is precious in politics and elsewhere.”
Nature “always on” new and related content, coupled with the variety of communication channels available for voters, has increased the complexity of the data collection process in polls and campaigns. “In the past, people answered the phone when you called their homes,” notes Hidalgo, describing analog methods previously used to collect voter data. Now, political scientists, data analysts and others must face the availability of streaming content, mobile devices and other channels including a large fractured media ecosystem.
The course opens a window on what is happening behind the scenes of local and national political campaigns, which called on the major in second -year political science Jackson Hamilton. “I followed this course hoping to extend my ability to use coding for political science applications, and in order to better understand how political models and predictions work,” he said.
“We have adapted our own sets of experimental questions and conceptions which, in our view, would be interesting,” adds Hamilton. “I found that political problems that get a lot of media coverage are not necessarily the same questions that divide the legislators, at least locally.”
Transparency and responsibility in politics and other areas
Teaching students effectively use tools such as survey and analysis of data can improve their ability to identify and combat disinformation and disinformation. “As a political scientist, I am substantially committed,” says Hidalgo, “and I would like to help others be engaged too.”
“There is a lot of data available, and this course provides a base and the resources necessary to understand and view it,” continues Hidalgo. “The ability to design, implement and understand surveys has value inside and outside the class.”
In politics, Hidalgo thinks that students' crew to sail effectively can potentially improve and increase civic engagement. Data, he says, can help defend ideas. “There is so much information, it is important to develop the skills and capacities necessary to understand and visualize it,” he says. “It has value for everyone.”
The Major of second -year physics Sean Wilson, who also followed the class this spring, notes the value of visualization and data analysis both as a potential physicist and voter. “The analysis of data in politics and physics is an essential work since voting trends, public opinion and government leadership change so often in the United States,” he says, “and modeling can be used to support physical hypotheses and improve our understanding of the functioning of things.”
For Wilson, the course can help anyone interested in understanding the behavior of large groups. “Politologists are constantly working to better understand how and why certain events occur in American policy, and data analysis is an effective tool for doing so,” he said. “Members of a representative democracy can make better decisions with this type of information.”
Hamilton, on the other hand, learned more about the behind the scenes at work in electoral policy. “I had the opportunity to create some questions of budget compromise, to have an idea of what people really thought that the government should spend money when they had to make choices,” he said.
“IT and data science are not only useful for STEM applications; Data science approaches can also be extremely useful in many social sciences, ”says Hamilton.
“(Hidalgo helped me to achieve) that I had to understand and use scientific approaches to data to better understand my areas of interest,” explains Hamilton. “He focuses on how different approaches in coding can be applied to different types of problems in political science.”
