Data-driven political science

The tutorial will summarize the state-of-the art in the growing area of computational political science. Like many others, this research domain is being revolutionized by the availability of open, big data and the increasing reach and importance of social media. The surging interest on the part of the academic community is matched by intense efforts on the part of political campaigns to use online data in order to learn how to best disseminate information and reach the right potential donors or voters. In this context, a tutorial can summarize existing methods in a fascinating, high-interest area and allow participants with diverse backgrounds to get inspiration from the methods and problems studied. The tutorial will feature seminal research concerning (i) political polarization, (ii) election prediction and polling, and (iii) political campaigning and influence propagation. The goal is not only to familiarize attendees with ideas from related conferences such as WWW, ICWSM or CIKM, but also to present ideas and quantitative methods closer to political science such as Poole's and Rosenthal's NOMINATE score for a politician's political orientation.