I am a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. My research explores how political ideas link together to form belief systems and ideologies. My work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Social Science Research, and I have been awarded the 2020 Dissertation-in-Progress award and the 2021 Outstanding Article Publication award from the ASA Mathematical Sociology Section. I am on the job market for the 2022-23 year.
My dissertation comprises three studies on the systematization of American political attitudes. In the first study, I show how American public opinion became markedly more ideologically organized over the past 15 years. In the second study, I borrow methods from bioinformatics to explore “local structures” in political attitudes that cut against the dominant liberal-conservative axis. In the third study, I use word embedding models to discover how liberal and conservative news differently construct the political landscape. The dissertation committee is co-chaired by John Levi Martin and James Evans.
I have also done research on how word embedding models can be used for cultural analysis, how changing political coalitions drove the polarization over science, and how ideology is linked to overconfidence among elite economists. More about my research can by found on this page.
I am a member of two research groups at the University of Chicago: Knowledge Lab and the Culture and Action Network . Check out their websites to learn more.
Austin C. Kozlowski 