Jacob Morrier

Ph.D. Candidate, Social Science

California Institute of Technology

I am a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Social Science at Caltech. 

I am a data and quantitative social scientist with expertise in applying sophisticated quantitative methodologies, especially causal inference, econometrics, and machine learning, to analyze administrative, behavioral, and text data.

Education

California Institute of Technology, 2019present

California Institute of Technology, 2021

Université du Québec à Montréal, 2019

Université ParisDauphine, 2018

Research

This paper explores how politicians respond to the public salience of policy issues when determining which topics to publicly address. Using new data and state-of-the-art methodology, our study provides a fresh perspective on this fundamental question. We focus on a multi-party parliamentary system, specifically the Canadian House of Commons, with a specific emphasis on the issue of climate change. To assess the attention given by political parties to various policy issues, we analyze transcripts from the Question Period spanning from April 2006 to June 2021. To gauge the public's level of concern for these issues, we incorporate data obtained from Google Trends. Employing an instrumental variable estimation strategy, our study causally estimates the extent to which the public salience of climate change influences elite attention. Our findings reveal that the public salience of climate change significantly influences the attention given to this issue by parties, albeit with noticeable partisan variations. Moreover, our research highlights the effectiveness of the Question Period in compelling the government to address challenging or potentially embarrassing issues. Lastly, we uncover evidence suggesting that the Liberal Party of Canada successfully increased the public salience of climate change during its tenure in government.

PLoS ONE. 19 (1): e0294047.

Leading up to the 2022 Congressional midterm elections, all predictions pointed to a Republican wave, given factors such as the incumbent president’s low approval rate and a struggling national economy. Accordingly, the underwhelming performance of the Republican Party surprised many, resulting in an election that became known as the “asterisk election” due to its unusual and seemingly unpredictable outcome. This study delves into the specifics of the 2022 midterms, exploring factors that may have influenced the results beyond those traditionally considered by political scientists. Our analysis particularly seeks to understand whether a sudden shift in the public salience of specific issues could have influenced voters’ preferences, leading them to consider factors they might not have otherwise. To achieve this, we analyzed data from a nationally representative sample of registered voters surveyed immediately after the midterm elections. Our findings reveal that the issue of abortion played a pivotal role during this election. The prominence of abortion was not predestined, as evidenced by a comparative analysis with data from a survey conducted after the 2020 presidential election. Indeed, it seems that the decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022 significantly increased the salience of abortion. This unexpected policy shock had a significant impact on the behavior of voters in the 2022 midterm elections.

Frontiers in Computer Science. 6: 1283735.

Online competitive action games are a very popular form of entertainment. While most are respectfully enjoyed by millions of players, a small group of players engages in disruptive behavior, such as cheating and hate speech. Identifying and subsequently moderating these toxic players is a challenging task. Previous research has only studied specific aspects of this problem using curated data and with limited access to real-world moderation practices. In contrast, our work offers a unique and holistic view of the universal challenges of moderating disruptive behavior in online systems. We combine an analysis of a large dataset from a popular online competitive first-person action title (Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare®II) with insights from stakeholders involved in moderation. We identify six universal challenges related to handling disruptive behaviors in such games. We discuss challenges omitted by prior work, such as handling high-volume imbalanced data or ensuring the comfort of human moderators. We also offer a discussion of possible technical, design, and policy approaches to mitigating these challenges.

Forthcoming, Journal of Politics.

In parliamentary systems, it is common for legislatures to offer a regular opportunity for their members to question government ministers. While these institutions fulfill an essential function for democratic accountability, they also represent an occasion for incivility to creep into political discourse. This article investigates the incidence of uncivil behavior in these institutions and identifies some of its covariates. Our focus is on the Canadian House of Commons. Using cutting-edge, open-source machine learning models, we measure the incidence and evolution of incivility in Question Periods from April 2006 to June 2021. We find significant evidence of uncivil behavior, especially insults and toxicity. Through a multivariate regression analysis, we show that variations in the incidence of uncivil behavior over time and across members of various parties are correlated with the time remaining until the next general election, the institutional roles of parties, the balance of power, and the language of interventions.

Challenger Entry and Electoral Accountability [Online Appendix]

Conditionally Accepted (Replication Pending), Political Science Research and Methods.

In this article, I investigate the effect of endogenous challenger entry on electoral accountability in the presence of adverse selection. To this end, I formulate a two-period electoral agency model wherein a potential challenger freely chooses whether to run for office. The effect of endogenous challenger entry on policy decisions is ambiguous: depending on model parameters, it can worsen or alleviate policy distortions. Analogously, marginally increasing the cost of running for office can amplify or reduce these distortions. This uncertainty regarding the effect on policymaking leads to equally ambiguous welfare implications. Nevertheless, I identify conditions under which endogenous challenger entry improves voter welfare. This suggests that, in some circumstances, imposing higher barriers to entry in elections can improve policymaking and voter welfare.

Uncovering the Viral Nature of Toxicity in Competitive Online Video Games (with Amine Mahmassani and R. Michael Alvarez)

Revised and Resubmitted, IEEE Transactions on Games.

Toxicity is a widespread phenomenon in competitive online video games. In addition to its direct undesirable effects, there is a concern that toxicity can spread to others, amplifying the harm caused by a single player's misbehavior. In this study, we estimate whether and to what extent a player's toxic speech spreads, causing their teammates to behave similarly. To this end, we analyze proprietary data from the free-to-play first-person action game Call of Duty®: Warzone™. We formulate and implement an instrumental variable identification strategy that leverages the network of interactions among players across matches. Our analysis reveals that all else equal, all of a player's teammates engaging in toxic speech increases their probability of engaging in similar behavior by 26.1 to 30.3 times the average player's likelihood of engaging in toxic speech. These findings confirm the viral nature of toxicity, especially toxic speech, in competitive online video games.

This paper proposes a novel methodology for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. Our approach consists of measuring the quality of an answer based on how accurately it can be identified among all observed answers given the question. This reflects the relevance and depth of engagement of the answer to the question. Similarly to semantic search, this measurement approach can be implemented by training a language model on the corpus of observed questions and answers without additional labeled data. We showcase and validate our methodology using data from the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our analysis reveals that while some answers have a weak semantic connection with questions, hinting at some evasion or obfuscation, answers are generally relevant, far surpassing what would be expected from random replies. Besides, our findings provide valuable insights into the correlates of answer quality. We find significant variations based on the party affiliation of the members of Parliament posing the questions. Finally, we uncover a meaningful correlation between the quality of answers and the topic of the questions.

In this paper, we investigate whether polarized issues carry greater importance in voters' electoral choices. Doing so requires a valid way to measure issue importance. To this end, we formulate a novel measurement approach using conjoint experiments to elicit issue importance. Our approach is grounded in the potential outcomes framework and designed to minimize respondents’ burden. In the aftermath of the 2022 Congressional midterm elections, we implemented this approach on a nationally representative sample of 2,109 U.S. registered voters. Using the resulting estimates, we measure the correlation between issue importance and their polarization. We consider two conceptions of political polarization: policy and partisan polarization. Our findings reveal that partisan polarization exhibits a strong and significant correlation with issue importance, whereas policy polarization does not. This offers insights into American voters' electoral behavior and raises further questions about the measurement of issue importance.

This article seeks to provide accurate estimates of the causal effect of exposure to toxic language on player engagement and the proliferation of toxic language. To this end, we analyze proprietary data from the first-person action video game Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® III, published by Activision®. To overcome causal identification problems, we implement an instrumental variables estimation strategy. Our findings confirm that exposure to toxic language significantly affects player engagement and the probability that players use similar language. Accordingly, video game publishers have a vested interest in addressing toxic language. Further, we demonstrate that this effect varies significantly depending on whether toxic language originates from opponents or teammates, whether it originates from teammates in the same party or a different party, and the match's outcome. This has meaningful implications regarding how resources for addressing toxicity should be allocated.

This article offers a rationale for candidates who voluntarily and preemptively place a cap on the number of terms they will eventually be in office. I build my analysis on a standard political agency model, to which I add an election campaign in which candidates can commit not to seek a second term. Pledging to term limits allows candidates to: (i) signal their private type and (ii) shield themselves from career concerns. By doing so, politicians leverage the fact that voters endogenously prefer to elect candidates who do not seek reelection because they either: (i) have, on average, more desirable characteristics or (ii) distort their policy decisions to a lesser extent. As a result, candidates who pledge to term limits have a higher probability of being elected in the first place. I show that there are plausible circumstances under which term limits pledges can be informative and simultaneously beneficial to voters.

Software

Miscellanea

Contact Information

E-mail Address: jmorrier [at] caltech.edu