PBPL 89/ GOVT 83.31/ QSS 30.24 – Professor Jason Barabas

This applied research seminar focused on empirical program evaluation and policy analysis. Lawmakers craft policies to address perceived societal issues, and this course emphasized how to determine whether these policies effectively achieve their intended results. By concentrating on research design principles, we learned to document cause-and-effect relationships more accurately. This included developing skills to design and conduct evaluations that identify the impact of social interventions.

Below is my final paper in the course, a statistical analysis of conservative opinions on social security, using a variety of designs (including a regression discontinuity design).

Below is a proposed experiment to evaluate the salience and effectiveness of synthetic content disclosures on political advertisements, which I handed in for my first paper in the course: