Many have sounded the alarm about how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are changing society, but Julian Haddad, a Ph.D. student in political science at UC Davis, thought there might be more to the story.
“AI is an increasingly large part of our discourse,” said Haddad. “We need to understand the ways that technology impacts our politics.”
This summer, Haddad is one of seven graduate students awarded a Department of Political Science Summer Collaborative Grant to support summer research in collaboration with a faculty member. The goal is for the student and faculty collaborator to co-author and submit a research article or book chapter for publication.
An intensive summer apprenticeship
The collaborative grants provide an intensive apprenticeship between Ph.D. students and faculty over the summer when students might otherwise have to teach or find other work to support themselves. Students learn how to formulate a stronger research question, find and collect appropriate data and run the analysis.
Several of the grants are funded by Ron Rapoport, the John Marshall Professor Emeritus of the Department of Government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
“When I do these with my students, we sit side by side and code together,” said Lauren Young, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the UC Davis Department of Political Science. “I think of it as like a way to rip the Band-Aid off on doing some of the harder research steps, but side by side with someone who's done it for decades.”
Two years ago, Young worked with a student on a project to create a global data set on election violence in Zimbabwe. Young has published extensively on election violence and collective action in Zimbabwe and Mexico. She was recently named a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow for her work.
During that collaboration, Young and her mentee Marika Miner created a process for coding election violence events that the student has continued to use even since taking on a postdoctoral fellowship in Norway. The two recently co-presented the research at the field’s flagship annual research conference by the American Political Science Association.
Connecting AI regulations to the welfare state
This summer, Haddad is trying to find out what makes people think differently about AI and work automation technologies. A body of literature suggests that welfare support provided by governments might play a role. This is where a faculty mentor can provide insights from a body of research and knowledge built over a career.
Daniel Kono, a professor of political science, is collaborating with Haddad on a chapter of his dissertation that seeks to answer this question. Kono is an internationally recognized expert in political economy and is providing a broader context to Haddad’s research.
“This isn't a new issue,” said Kono. “AI is new, but concerns about technological changes have been going on for a long time, at least to the Luddites back in the 18th century.”
Kono suggested a comprehensive dataset from Europe called Eurobarometer that has regularly collected public opinion surveys in multiple countries on behalf of European Union Institutions since 1974. This summer, Haddad and Kono have been integrating data from Eurobarometer and other sources that might reveal statistical connections between public sentiment about AI and the presence of public benefit programs like unemployment insurance or job retraining.
“He's my advisor for a reason,” said Haddad. “His expertise in political economy and guidance on the framing of complex research is making this work both more ambitious and more achievable. I think it's certainly going to accelerate this project and make me a better scholar."
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