The Social Science Research and Instructional Council (SSRIC) is a collaboration of CSU campuses supported by the CSU Chancellor’s Office. SSRIC is the oldest of the CSU affinity groups. The council assists quantitative learning, teaching and research in the social sciences through access to archival database resources as well as an online repository of teaching materials, a student research symposium and workshops for faculty.
From Undergraduate Conference to Gerrymandering Expert
Mike Latner never gave much thought to statistics or quantitative analysis while he was at California State University, Chico, until he was encouraged by a professor to write a paper, using quantitative methods, for SSRIC’s annual Social Science Student Symposium (S4) conference. Latner wrote the paper, attended the conference at San Francisco State and won the award for the best paper of the conference.
The experience fundamentally inspired Latner’s career choices. Following graduation, he worked for four years at the Field Research Corp., a California public opinion research firm. He attended graduate school to broaden his quantitative skills and to make a career of using data to better understand government and politics. After receiving his doctorate in political science from University of California, Irvine, Dr. Latner accepted an offer at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, eventually becoming an associate professor of political science.
He since has become a nationally recognized expert on gerrymandering and legislative redistricting. His book with co-authors Anthony McGann, Charles Anthony Smith and Alex Keena, “Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular Sovereignty” (Cambridge University Press), demonstrates that partisan gerrymandering became noticeably more common after the 2010 census. He is also the current Kendall Voting Rights Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.
Student's Research on Congress Leads to Job as Twitter Analyst
Anna Rulloda majored in political science and minored in both statistics and ethics, public policy, science and technology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
In her paper for SSRIC’s annual Social Science Student Symposium (S4) conference, Rulloda presented a paper combining many of those interests.
She undertook a massive data-collection process, scraping web data on 2018 congressional candidates’ Twitter activity and then coding the contents of candidates’ tweets.
Grouping this data into eight categories based on whether a candidate was female or male, Democrat or Republican, and won or lost, she compared the content of tweets by candidates from each category with respect to a variety of gender civil rights topics.
She found that, controlling for party and whether they won or lost, female candidates tweeted more often than male candidates about family issues and the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, while Democratic candidates tweeted about LGBTQ, health, racial and civil rights issues more often that Republican candidates did.
Rulloda put this experience to good use after graduation—she now works as an analyst for Twitter.