Le Bao (宝乐)

I am 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, comparative politics, and political behavior. A central theme of my research is how economic, institutional, and environmental contexts affect people’s preferences and behavior. I approach this work from both substantive and methodological perspectives.

Methodologically, my research focuses on spatial methods, Bayesian and nonparametric statistics, and survey methodology. I’m also interested in the nexus of the aforementioned methods and causal inference and computational tools. Substantively, I am interested in political behavior and public opinion, with emphasis on contextual effects of economic, institutional, and environmental factors on political behaviors and regional focuses on Europe and East Asia.

My dissertation project focuses on developing and improving the methodology of studying mass political polarization. In particular, I introduce a nonparametric approach to measure mass political polarization comparatively and a compositional approach to estimate the effects of subcomponents of macro-level political behavior. Using these techniques, I investigate the relationship between inequality, welfare
redistribution, and mass political polarization in European countries.

At MDI, I am currently working with the Environmental Impact Data Collaborative (EIDC) team and using cutting-edge methods to investigate the unevenly distributed environmental impacts on local communities.

I also wear another hat as a data scientist. I’m interested in statistical simulations, container computing, and reproducible research.