Justin Grimmer

About

I am the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy in Stanford University's Department of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Co-Director of the Democracy and Polarization Lab. My research focuses on elections, representation, artificial intelligence, and data science.

I am a co-founder of Homekey, an AI-based real estate start up. I also regularly testify as an expert witness in litigation on election administration and allegations of voter fraud. Previously, I worked as a consultant for Meta, Inc, focusing on issues at the intersection of politics and social media.

Research

Books

• Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability. With Sean Westwood and Solomon Messing. Princeton University Press, 2014.
• Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. With Margaret E. Roberts and Brandon Stewart. Princeton University Press, 2022.

Working Papers

• How to Measure the Burdens of Voting (with Eitan Hersh and Sean Westwood). Under Review.
• Measuring Perceived Slant in Large Language Models Through User Evaluations (with Sean Westwood and Andrew B. Hall). Under Review.
• An Evaluation of Fraud Claims from the 2020 Trump Election Contests (with Abhinav Ramaswamy).
• Assessing the Reliability of Probabilistic US Presidential Election Forecasts May Take Decades (with Dean Knox and Sean Westwood). Under Review.
• A Statistical Framework to Engage the Problem of Disengaged Survey Respondents: Measuring Public Support for Partisan Violence (with Matt Tyler and Sean Westwood).

Publications

• How Shifting Priorities and Capacity Affect Policy Work and Constituency Service: Evidence from a Census of Legislator Requests to U.S. Federal Agencies (with Eleanor Powell and Devin Judge-Lord). American Journal of Political Science, Forthcoming.
• Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes (with Will Marble and Cole Tanigawa-Lau). Journal of Politics, 2025.
  • Previous draft circulated as "Who Put Trump in the White House? Explaining the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Trump's Victory (With Will Marble)"
• AutoPersuade: A Framework for Evaluating and Explaining Persuasive Arguments (with Till Saenger, Musashi Hink, and Brandon Stewart). EMNLP, 2024.
• Who are the Election Skeptics? Evidence from the 2022 Midterm Elections (with Derek E Holliday, Yphtach Lelkes, and Sean J. Westwood). Election Law Journal, 2024.
• How Election Rules Affect Who Wins (with Eitan Hersh). Journal of Legal Analysis, 2024.
• Evaluating a New Generation of Expansive Claims about Vote Manipulation (with Michael C. Herron and Matt Tyler). Election Law Journal, 2024.
• Naive regression requires weaker assumptions than factor models to adjust for multiple cause confounding (with Dean Knox and Brandon Stewart). Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2023.
• Causal Inference with Latent Treatments (with Christian Fong). American Journal of Political Science, 2023. Supplementary Information
• How To Make Causal Inferences Using Texts (with Naoki Egami, Christian Fong, Molly Roberts, and Brandon Stewart). Science Advances, 2022.
• Reply to Kalmoe and Mason: The pitfalls of using surveys to measure low-prevalence attitudes and behavior (with Sean Westwood, Matt Tyler, and Clayton Nall). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022.
• Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond (with Amir Feder, Katherine A. Keith, Emaad Manzoor, Reid Pryzant, Dhanya Sridhar, Zach Wood-Doughty, Jacob Eisenstein, Roi Reichart, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Victor Veitch, Diyi Yang). Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022.
• Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence (with Sean Westwood, Matt Tyler, and Clayton Nall). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022.
  • Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason Reply
  • Westwood, Grimmer, Nall and Tyler Reply to the Reply
• Partisan Enclaves and Information Bazaars: Mapping Selective Exposure to Online News (with Matt Tyler and Shanto Iyengar). Journal of Politics, 2022. Supplementary Information
• How Does the Rising Number of Women in the U.S. Congress Change Deliberation? Evidence from House Committee Hearings (with Pamela Ban, Jaclyn Kaslovsky, and Emily West). Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2022.
• The Durable Differential Deterrent Effects of Strict Photo Identification Laws (with Jesse Yoder). Political Science Research & Methods, 2022.
• Legislator Advocacy on Behalf of Constituents and Corporate Donors: A Case Study of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (with Eleanor Powell and Devin Judge-Lord). In Accountability and Public Policy: Voters and Governance in the Contemporary United States. Cameron. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• No Evidence for Systematic Voter Fraud: A Guide To Statistical Claims About the 2020 Election (with Andrew C. Eggers and Haritz Garro). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021. Replication Archive
• Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach (with Margaret E. Roberts and Brandon Stewart). Annual Review of Political Science, 2021.
• Political Cultures (with Lisa Blaydes). Political Science Research & Methods, 2020.
• Obstacles to estimating voter ID laws' effect on turnout (with Eitan Hersh, Marc Meredith, Jonathan Mummolo, and Clayton Nall). Journal of Politics, 2018. 80(3). Replication Code Supplemental Appendix
  • Presentation Slides, Github for Slide Replication
• Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds (with Lisa Blaydes and Alison McQueen). Journal of Politics, 2018. 80(4). Supplemental Appendix Replication Code
• Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects and the Effects of Heterogeneous Treatments with Ensemble Methods (with Solomon Messing and Sean J. Westwood). Political Analysis, 2017. 25(4), 413–434. Supplemental Appendix Replication Code
• Discovery of Treatments from Text Corpora (with Christian Fong). Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016, Berlin, Germany.
• Money in Exile: Campaign Contributions and Committee Access (with Eleanor Neff Powell). Journal of Politics, 2016. 78(4), 974–988. Supplemental Appendix Replication Code
• Measuring Representational Style in the House: The Tea Party, Obama and Legislators' Changing Expressed Priorities. In Data Analytics in Social Science, Government, and Industry. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• TopicCheck: Interactive Alignment for Assessing Topic Model Stability (with Jason Chuang, Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, Rebecca Weiss, Dustin Tingley, and Jeffrey Heer). NAACL HLT, 2015.
• We're All Social Scientists Now: How Big Data, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference Work Together. PS: Political Science & Politics, 2015. 48(1), 80–83.
• Computer-Assisted Content Analysis: Topic Models for Exploring Multiple Subjective Interpretations (with Jason Chuang, John D. Wilkerson, Rebecca Weiss, Dustin Tingley, Brandon M. Stewart, Margaret E. Roberts, Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh, Leah Findlater, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Jeffrey Heer). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Human-Propelled Machine Learning, 2014.
• Congressmen in Exile: The Politics and Consequences of Involuntary Committee Removal (with Eleanor Neff Powell). The Journal of Politics, 2013. 75(4), 907–920. Supplementary Information Replication Code
• Appropriators Not Position Takers: The Distorting Effects of Electoral Incentives on Congressional Representation. American Journal of Political Science, 2013. 57(3), 624–642. Supplementary Information Replication Code
• Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts (with Brandon Stewart). Political Analysis, 2013. 21(3), 267–297.
  • Awarded Political Analysis Editor's Choice Award for an article providing an especially significant contribution to political methodology.
• Elevated Threat-Levels and Decreased Expectations: How Democracy Handles Terrorist Threats (with Tabitha Bonilla). Poetics, 2013. 41, 650–669.
• Evaluating Model Performance in Fictitious Prediction Problems. Discussion of "Multinomial Inverse Regression for Text Analysis" by Matthew Taddy. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2013. 108(503), 770–771.
• How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation (with Solomon Messing and Sean Westwood). American Political Science Review, 2012. 106(4), 703–719. Supplementary Information Replication Code
• General Purpose Computer-Assisted Clustering and Conceptualization (with Gary King). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011. 108(7), 2643–2650.
  • Selected media coverage: NPR "On the Media", NPR "Here and Now", NewsMax, Wisconsin Public Radio "Joy Cardin", Forbes Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, PBS
• An Introduction to Bayesian Inference via Variational Approximations. Political Analysis, 2011. 19(1), 32–47. Supplemental Notes
  • Included in Political Analysis virtual issue on Big Data in Political Science
• Approval Regulation and Endogenous Provision of Confidence: Theory and Analogies to Licensing, Safety, and Financial Regulation (with Dan Carpenter and Eric Lomazoff). Regulation and Governance, 2010. 4(4), 383–407.
• A Bayesian Hierarchical Topic Model for Political Texts: Measuring Expressed Agendas in Senate Press Releases. Political Analysis, 2010. 18(1), 1–35.
  • Awarded 2010 Robert H Durr Award for the best paper applying quantitative methods to a substantive problem.
  • Awarded 2011 Warren Miller Prize for the best paper published in Political Analysis in 2010.
  • Included in Political Analysis virtual issue on Bayesian methods in Political Science
  • Supplemental Notes

Papers, Memos, and Other Public Writing on Election Administration

• Placer County's Turnout is Not Anomalous
• No Evidence Placer County Elections are Manipulated
• High Correlations Between Predicted and Actual Ballots Do Not Imply Fraud (with Matt Tyler)
• Changing the Default: The Impact of Motor-Voter Reform in Colorado (with Jonathan Rodden)
• Evaluating Look Ahead America's 'The Georgia Report' On Illegal, Out-Of-State Voting In The 2020 Election (with Andrew Hall and Dan Thompson)

Book Reviews and Other Writing

• Review of Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President. Public Opinion Quarterly, 2019. 83(1).
• Graduate School is 1/3 George Strait, 1/3 Kanye West, and 1/3 Paula Radcliffe

Dormant Working Papers

• The Limited Effect of Presidential Public Appeals (with Annie Franco and Chloe Lim). Supplemental Appendix
• Changing the Subject to Build an Audience: How Elected Officials Affect Constituent Communication (with Annie Franco and Monica Lee)
• Creating and Destroying Party Brands (with Craig Goodman, David Parker, and Frances Zlotnick)
• The Downside of Deadlines (with Dan Carpenter).
  • Popular Press: Boston Globe, Washington Post
• Are Close Elections Random? (with Brian Feinstein, Eitan Hersh, and Dan Carpenter). Supplementary Information
• A Class of Bayesian Semiparametric Cluster-Topic Models for Political Texts (with Rachel Shorey, Hanna Wallach, and Frances Zlotnik)

Teaching

Courses Taught

• Approaches to Studying Political Science (Political Science 420A)
• The Politics of Communication (Political Science 24N)
• American Political Institutions (Political Science 120C)
• The Science of Politics (Political Science 1; Syllabus)
• Introduction to Mathematics for Political Science (Course Github; Lecture Videos)
• Introduction to Machine Learning for Social Scientists (Political Science 150B, 353B; Syllabus)
• Political Methodology III (Political Science 350C; Course Github)
• Texts as Data (Political Science 452; Syllabus & Lecture Notes 2014, Lecture videos; Course Github, 2019)
• Controversies in American Public Policy (Political Science 127; Syllabus)

Helpful Documents

• Guidance (and advice) for including me on your dissertation committee
• Advice on graduate school

C.V.

A copy of my CV is available here.

Contact