Le Bao (宝乐)

I’m a Postdoc Fellow at the Massive Data Institute (MDI) of Georgetown University. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at American University in 2022. I was also previously a Visiting Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. I study political methodology and comparative politics, with focuses on (comparative) political behavior.

I’m interested in public opinion, political psychology, and political communication, with emphasis on political polarization and regional focus on Europe and East Asia. I also study American public opinion on foreign policy. I have also been working as a project assistant for several public opinion survey projects in both the U.S. and China.

Methodologically, I focus on developing and improving the methods for studying political behavior, particularly for comparing behavior across contexts and for detecting unconventional data structures in the research of behaviors (e.g. multidimensionality, clustering, ordering, ranking, network, etc.). I’m interested in applying Bayesian modeling, geospatial methods, causal inference, survey methodology, and computational methods to questions of political science.