I am a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Computational Social Science at the California Institute of Technology, working with Michael Alvarez. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy of the University of Toronto and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, working with Peter Loewen. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2021.
I work at the intersection of comparative politics, international political economy, and political methodology to understand how different socio-economic shocks affect democracy, politics, and policies.
My postdoctoral research revolves around two themes: technology and climate change. I investigate how technology and globalization are changing governance and politics, from citizens’ assessment of the trade-offs associated with automation, to their perception of governments’ use of artificial intelligence. Furthermore, my work delves into the intersection of climate change and political behavior. I strive to uncover the predictors of sustainability behaviors and employ survey experiments to explore the factors influencing support for a carbon tax.
Across my research, I examine a wide array of social phenomena, with an emphasis on the causes and consequences of the global rise in populism. My work explores the observed decline in support for democratic institutions and its relation to socio-economic crises and foreign-imposed conditionality, analyzes the drivers of economic policy preferences towards contentious societal issues (check out this podcast where I discuss my dissertation project) and explains the systematic, mutually reinforcing association between populism and economic dysfunction in a number of countries.
I also exploit my life-long passion for soccer to advance our understanding of consequential issues pertaining to racial discrimination and human rights. In collaboration with my colleague Morgan Wack, I devised an innovative data collection strategy that leverages realistic skin tone measurements from a popular virtual reality soccer platform to identify how racial biases influence in-game referees’ decisions. Our publication was covered by the Guardian. In two ongoing projects with Kevin Aslett and Morgan Wack, we employ a novel machine learning algorithm to identify evidence of sports-washing in connection to the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
From April 2020 to June 2021 I worked as a research assistant on the UW COVID-19 State Policy Project, led by Chris Adolph and John Wilkerson, the nation-leading daily data collection effort on social distancing policies in response to COVID-19 in the US.
Beatrice Magistro 