Best Yang Yang Zhou Podcasts (2025)

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Rules of Law, with Egor Lazarev 1:20:33

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4M ago1:20:33

1:20:33

Political analysts are thinking a lot these days about the rule of law: where it comes from, what sustains it, how it can break down. Those are hard enough questions in themselves. And, yet — they simplify away an important complexity. They assume that there is only one law that rules. As our guest today, Dr. Egor Lazarev – assistant professor of p…

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Violence as Campaign Strategy, with Niloufer Siddiqui 1:14:14

7M ago1:14:14

1:14:14

When we think of weak democracies around the world, we often think of their inability to maintain a monopoly on violence because of challenges outside the state – like militias, rebel groups, criminal gangs, and other external, violent organizations. But sometimes it’s actors deeply intertwined with the state – like political parties – who are enga…

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How Criminal Governance Undermines Elections, with Jessie Trudeau 1:18:23

1y ago1:18:23

1:18:23

In democracies all around the world, criminal organizations are involved in electoral politics. Notable examples include the Sicilian mafia and Pablo Escobar's drug cartel in Colombia. We sometimes think of these criminal groups as having politicians in their pockets or as directing politicians to do their bidding at the barrel of a gun. But our gu…

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What College Dorms can teach us about Culture, with Joan Ricart-Huguet 1:18:59

1y ago1:18:59

1:18:59

Today on Scope Conditions: college dorms shed light on where group culture comes from and how it molds us. At Harry Potter’s alma mater, each new student is assigned to a House that aligns with their true character. The mystical Sorting Hat takes the courageous ones and sorts them into House Gryffindor, while the studious know-it-alls go to Ravencl…

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Statecraft as Stagecraft, with Iza (Yue) Ding 1:16:03

1+ y ago1:16:03

1:16:03

Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability…

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20. Navigating the Shores of Computational Text Analysis Validity with Christian Baden, Christian Pipa, and Mariken van der Velden 57:11

2y ago57:11

57:11

In this episode, we speak to Christian Baden, Christian Pipal, and Mariken van der Velden about their 2022 journal paper in Communications Methods and Measures, titled, “Three Gaps in Computational Text Analysis Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Agenda”. They co-authored this paper with Martijn Schoonvelde, and the authors span several discip…

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How the UN Keeps Peace Among Neighbors, with William G. Nomikos 1:15:11

2y ago1:15:11

1:15:11

Today on Scope Conditions, what’s the secret to successful peacekeeping? We often think of civil conflict as being driven by organized, armed groups – like rebel militias and state armies. But as our guest today reminds us, a leading cause of conflict around the world is communal violence – fights that break out between civilians over land, cattle,…

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Race-Based Coalitions in Three Chinatowns, with Jae Yeon Kim 59:01

2+ y ago59:01

59:01

Today on Scope Conditions: when is racial status a unifying force in politics? Shared experiences of prejudice and discrimination can sometimes help create shared political identities within and across racial minority groups and strong incentives for collective mobilization. But as our guest today points out, neither race nor racial-minority status…

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Can We Immunize Against Misinformation? with Sumitra Badrinathan 1:17:28

2+ y ago1:17:28

1:17:28

Today on Scope Conditions, can we teach voters how to tell truth from lies? Around the world, governments and political parties wield misinformation as a powerful political weapon – a weapon that is massively amplified by social media. A large and growing literature has investigated how misinformation spreads and ways of combating it – from correct…

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Trial and Terror, with Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh 1:16:17

3y ago1:16:17

1:16:17

Today on Scope Conditions: why the judge’s gavel is sometimes mightier than the sword. Political trials – or show trials – are a well-known mode of repression in authoritarian settings. We often think of a show trial as a sham version of the real thing: the autocrat affords his enemy a semblance of due process to give off the appearance of fairness…

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Overcoming the Hijab Penalty, with Donghyun Danny Choi 1:21:38

3y ago1:21:38

1:21:38

Today on Scope Conditions: what drives discrimination against immigrants – and what can be done about it? When social scientists have sought to explain anti-immigrant bias, they’ve tended to focus on one of two possible causes: the perceived economic threat that migrants might pose to the native born or the cultural threat driven by differences in …

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“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve Bates 1:14:24

3y ago1:14:24

1:14:24

A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the cr…

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19. Constructing a Taxonomy of Implicit Hate Speech Grounded in Social Theory with Diyi Yang and David Muchlinski 56:02

3y ago56:02

56:02

Our guests on this episode are Diyi Yang, assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, and David Muchlinski, assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, both at Georgia Tech. We discuss their EMNLP 2021 paper, "Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speech." This paper is co-authored with …

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Partisan Polarization in Israel, with Chagai Weiss 1:12:06

3+ y ago1:12:06

1:12:06

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about rising partisan animosity and what can be done about it. When we think about partisan polarization, we’re often thinking about the United States – and about how the policy attitudes or ideological positions of Republicans and Democrats have moved further and further apart in recent decades. But partisa…

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18. Gender Patterns in English-Language Fiction and Interrogating Data with Ted Underwood and David Bamman 53:50

3+ y ago53:50

53:50

This episode features Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and David Bamman, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. We discuss their 2018 Cultural Analytics paper co-authored with literary studies PhD student Sabrina Lee, ti…

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Online Dissent, Offline Repression, with Alexandra Siegel 1:06:17

3+ y ago1:06:17

1:06:17

Can autocrats fight online dissent with offline repression? In the world’s most authoritarian regimes, on-the-ground forms of protest or expressions of dissent are quickly quashed. So the online world – especially social media – has emerged as a critical venue for activists and reformers to express opposition and sustain their movements. Given its …

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17. Hashtag Network Analysis and Interwoven Research Ethics with Ryan Gallagher and Brooke Foucault Welles 55:50

3+ y ago55:50

55:50

Our guests in this episode are Ryan Gallagher, a PhD Candidate in Network Science at Northeastern University, and Brooke Foucault Welles, an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. We discuss their 2019 CSCW paper, "Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives: The Networked Disclosure Landsca…

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Europe's Hidden Legal Architects, with Tommaso Pavone 1:26:49

3+ y ago1:26:49

1:26:49

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re talking about the origins of supranational power. The European Union has no army. It levies no taxes. Covering a population of 450 million, its administrative bureaucracy is on par with that of a moderate-sized city. And yet the EU’s treaties, directives, and regulations – 50,000 pages worth – are enforced daily acr…

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Diagnosing Democracy's Representation Gap, with Sergio Montero 1:05:54

3+ y ago1:05:54

1:05:54

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we ask: what happens when your favorite candidate isn’t even running? We often think about the quality of democratic representation in terms of the outcomes that citizens get. For instance, we compare the policies a government enacts to what citizens say they want in surveys. Alternatively, we might compare the …

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16. Measuring Uptake in Classroom Conversations and Using NLP to Support Teachers with Dora Demszky 50:26

3+ y ago50:26

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This episode features Dora Demszky, a PhD student in Linguistics at Stanford University. Dora works at the intersection of natural language processing and education. We discuss her ACL 2021 paper titled "Measuring Conversational Uptake: A Case Study on Student-Teacher Interactions", co-authored with Jing Liu, Zid Mancenido, Julie Cohen, Heather Hil…

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15. Race in Computational Disinformation Analysis and Deep Reading with Deen Freelon 51:34

3+ y ago51:34

51:34

Our guest in this episode is Deen Freelon, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina in the School of Journalism and Media. We chat about his 2020 Social Science Computer Review Paper "Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation" with co-authors Michael Bossetta, Chris Wells, Josephine Lukito…

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14. The Past Decade of Computational Social Science Research with David Lazer 52:59

3+ y ago52:59

52:59

In this episode, we talk with David Lazer, the University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and the Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. We discuss two seminal papers in computational social science he co-authored a decade apart: "Life in the network: the coming age of c…

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13. Finding (Mis)alignments in Public Opinion and Wisdom in Collaboration Management with Kenneth Joseph and Sarah Shugars 49:43

3+ y ago49:43

49:43

Our guests on this episode are Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, and Sarah Shugars, a Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Center for Data Science. We discuss the process behind their EMNLP 2021 paper, “(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public O…

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How Palestine Polarized, with Dana El Kurd 1:14:06

3+ y ago1:14:06

1:14:06

Today on Scope Conditions, we’re speaking with Dr. Dana El Kurd, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond, about her recent book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. In this book, Dana seeks to unravel a puzzle of Palestinian political development. With the signing of the Oslo Accor…

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12. Understanding Conversational Patterns in Police Community Interactions with Vinodkumar Prabhakaran and Camilla Griffiths 49:08

3+ y ago49:08

49:08

Our guests on this episode are Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, who was a computer science postdoc at Stanford and now a senior research scientist at Google, and Camilla Griffiths, who is a postdoc at Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). With Hang Su, Prateek Verma, Nelson Morgan, Jennifer Eberhardt, and Dan Jurafsky, they …

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11. The Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Voter Turnout and Overcoming Project Setbacks with Aaron Schein 56:54

3+ y ago56:54

56:54

This episode features Aaron Schein, a computer scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. We discuss his WWW 2021 paper "Assessing the Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Turnout in the 2018 US Midterm Elections", co-authored with Keyon Vafa, Dhanya Sridhar, Victor Veitch, Jeffery Quinn, James Moffet, David Blei, and Donald Green.…

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Randomizing Together (Part 2), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair 50:35

4y ago50:35

50:35

Today’s episode is Part 2 of our conversation about metaketas with Dr. Tara Slough, an Assistant Professor of Politics at NYU, who co-led with Daniel Rubenson a metaketa on the governance of natural resources that was published this year in PNAS; and Dr. Graeme Blair, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA, who co-led a metaketa with F…

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10. Political Discourse and Substantive-Methodological Intersections with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling 43:17

4y ago43:17

43:17

In this episode, we talk with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling. Justine is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Arthur is a Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. We discuss their 2017 EMNLP paper, with Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, "Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in politica…

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Randomizing Together (Part 1), with Tara Slough and Graeme Blair 1:05:47

4y ago1:05:47

1:05:47

The last two decades have seen an explosion of field experimentation in political science and economics. Field experiments are often seen as the gold standard for policy evaluation. If you want to know if an intervention will work, run a randomized controlled trial, and do it in a natural setting. Field experiments offer up a powerful mix of credib…

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9. Reddit Debates and Interdisciplinary Multilingualism with Emaad Manzoor 52:02

4y ago52:02

52:02

Our guest on this episode is Emaad Manzoor, an Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Along with George H. Chen, Dokyun Lee, and Michael D. Smith, he wrote "Influence via Ethos: On the Persuasive Power of Reputation in Deliberation Online" which is currently under review at Management Sc…

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Why Empires Declared a War on Drugs, with Diana Kim 1:13:30

4y ago1:13:30

1:13:30

Today on Scope Conditions: how the paper-pushers of Empires reshaped colonialism in Southeast Asia. Our guest is Dr. Diana Kim, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Hans Kohn member (2021-22) at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies. In her award-winning book, Empires of…

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Can Boosting State Capacity Curb Social Disorder? with Anna Wilke 1:19:43

4y ago1:19:43

1:19:43

Today we are talking about the problem of maintaining social order. In particular, what happens when citizens see the police as ineffective and, in turn, decide to take the law into their own hands? And once mob justice becomes commonplace in a society, what can be done? In places where the state is weak, citizens often have to take it upon themsel…

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8. The Evolution of Computational Social Science from a Sociology Perspective with Chris Bail 51:12

4y ago51:12

51:12

This unique episode centers on a "meta" discussion on interdisciplinary work involving large-scale social data. We interview Chris Bail, a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University. Last year, Chris and co-authors Achim Edelman, Tom Wolff, and Danielle Montagne published an overview paper titled "Computational Social Science and S…

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7. The Power of Birth Stories’ Narratives and Intellectual Generosity with Maria Antoniak and Karen Levy 53:32

4y ago53:32

53:32

This episode features Maria Antoniak, a PhD student, and Karen Levy, an assistant professor, who are both in the Department of Information Science at Cornell. Maria, who has a background in computational linguistics, and Karen, who has a background in law and sociology, are co-authors, along with David Mimno, on the CSCW 2019 paper "Narrative Paths…

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6. Extracting Events from Text and Grad School Memories with Brendan O'Connor and Brandon Stewart 1:10:34

4y ago1:10:34

1:10:34

Our guests in this episode are Brendan O'Connor, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst, and Brandon Stewart, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. We talk with them about their 2013 ACL paper (with co-author Noah Smith) “Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context” which presents a proba…

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5. Opioid Use Recovery on Social Media and Mentoring Undergrad Collaborators with Stevie Chancellor 49:06

4y ago49:06

49:06

In this episode, we talked to Stevie Chancellor, who is the lead author on a 2019 CHI paper titled "Discovering Alternative Treatments for Opioid Use Recovery in Social Media". Along with Stevie, who is a computer scientist, the team of authors included clinical psychologist and addiction researcher George Nitzburg, Stevie’s advisor Munmun De Choud…

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4. COVID-19 Mobility Networks and Post-Publication Scientific Communication with Serina Chang 49:57

4+ y ago49:57

49:57

We discuss the paper "Mobility network models of COVID-19 explain inequities and inform reopening" with first author and Stanford computer science PhD student Serina Chang. This paper's team of interdisciplinary authors include other computer scientists (Emma Pierson, Pang Wei Koh, and Jure Leskovec), sociologists (Beth Redbird and David Grusky), a…

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3. Digital Health Communication and Punk Rock Academics with Ethan Zuckerman 41:34

4+ y ago41:34

41:34

In this episode, we talk to Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches public policy, communication, and information. We discuss his paper "Digital Health Communication and Global Public Influence: A Study of the Ebola Epidemic" which was published in the Journal of Health Communication in 2017…

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2. Analyzing Menstrual Cycle Data and Math Transcending Boundaries with Emma Pierson 44:10

4+ y ago44:10

44:10

We talk with Emma Pierson, PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and incoming assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, about her paper "Daily, weekly, seasonal and menstrual cycles in women’s mood, behaviour and vital signs" published in Nature Human Behavior, 2021. This was joint work with fellow computer scientists (Tim Althoff an…

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1. Abolitionist Newspapers and Maintaining 8-Year Project Momentum with Lauren Klein and Sandeep Soni 54:38

4+ y ago54:38

54:38

This episode features two guests: Lauren Klein, an associate professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, and Sandeep Soni, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Their Cultural Analytics paper, "Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers", was published ea…

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The Autocrat's Gambit, with Anne Meng 1:14:19

4+ y ago1:14:19

1:14:19

By their very nature, autocracies are political systems in which power is highly concentrated; dictators can do pretty much as they please. So dictatorships might seem an unusual place to go looking for institutions: the rules and structures that limit discretion and set bounds on who can do what. Yet over the last two decades, political scientists…

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Manipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai Hassan 1:13:01

4+ y ago1:13:01

1:13:01

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power. Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle…

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Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman 1:09:47

4+ y ago1:09:47

1:09:47

This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power. For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, ab…

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Surviving the Syrian Civil War, with Justin Schon 55:41

4+ y ago55:41

55:41

In this episode of Scope Conditions, we talk about how civilians seek to survive civil war. Our guest is Dr. Justin Schon, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia’s Democratic Statecraft Lab. In his new book, Surviving the War in Syria, Justin examines the repertoires of strategies that civilians choose from as they seek to keep themse…

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Redistribution as Fairness, with Charlotte Cavaillé 1:21:47

4+ y ago1:21:47

1:21:47

We are talking today about the politics of redistribution in an age of rising inequality. Our guest is Dr. Charlotte Cavaillé, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Ford School. We discuss with Charlotte her book project, Fair Enough: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality, which seeks to explain how c…

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Strategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman 55:02

4+ y ago55:02

55:02

In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifference a deliberate policy strategy? We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and…

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The Gravitational Pull of Europe's Far Right, with Tarik Abou-Chadi 1:11:05

4+ y ago1:11:05

1:11:05

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies. Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic …

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How Strong Legislatures Emerge, with Ken Opalo 57:10

4+ y ago57:10

57:10

In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrain the executive: an elected assembly that serves as a check on executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy.…

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Public Education as an Autocratic Project, with Agustina Paglayan 1:03:31

5y ago1:03:31

1:03:31

In this conversation, we talk with Dr. Agustina Paglayan, an assistant professor of political science at UC San Diego, about her project “The Dark Side of Education,” an examination of the spread of mass primary schooling around the world. Paglayan recently published an article on the topic in the American Political Science Review and has a larger …

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Middle-Class Guardians of Autocracy, with Bryn Rosenfeld 51:47

5y ago51:47

51:47

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Bryn Rosenfeld, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, about her new book, The Autocratic Middle Class: How State Dependency Reduces the Demand for Democracy (Princeton University Press). This book’s starting point is a puzzling observation that Rosenfeld made during years conducting research i…