Writing Samples

Thresholds of Disillusionment My final paper for the first-year course POLSCI 611: Intro to American National Government. Drawing on existing literature on agenda setting and political identity, I offer a formal model of the disillusionment process that incorporates consituents’ perceptions of (limited) policy power in their assessments of “what is” versus what “ought to be” (Block 2010). I then propose that there exists a “threshold” of disillusionment — a point at which the perception of limited policy power drives consitutents away from status quo political behavior. This deviation from the status quo is intentional — it is pursued with the goal of consolidating policy power.

Academic Writing Sample I. My senior undergaduate capstone project. Beginning with court records data from the North Carolina Administrative office of the Courts, I introduce a novel set of covariates from the CDC Social Vulnerability Index. I explore the interplay between social vulnerability and front-end contact with the North Carolina legal system throughout the state at the level of the Census tract. I find variation in the nature of vulnerability and criminal legal contact.

I also employ spatial techniques to identify clusters of vulnerability throughout the state and in Wake County, one of the state’s most populus county. I find that social vulnerability is a significant predictor of misdemeanor contact in the county; similar to the statewide analysis, I find variation in the types of vulnerability that are associated with misdemeanor contact for Black and White North Carolinians.

Academic writing sample II. My final project from POLI 281: Data in Politics I, using OLS regression to analyze voter wait times by demograpic.

Academic writing sample III. A shorter paper from POLI 130: Intro to Comparative Politics, using OLS regression to explore the impact of education on the development of strong domestic economies.

Code selections. Examples of R scripts and their associated figures/tables. These were written as part of my work with the Security and Political Economy Lab at USC, Summer 2021. Samples range from visualization to table generation to backend data management.

You can also find Python data science examples (albiet natural science, not social science) here.

Report sample. Fall 2021 report for the New Voters Project, utilizing open-source housing data to strategize a dorm-centric voter registration campaign for the start of the semester.