Big Data & Political Strategy

Some experts on U.S. political campaigns have argued that big data has fundamentally changed the way politicians win elections and pursue policymaking. With the combination of massive amounts of personal data and information about individual voters and society at large, readily available processing power, sophisticated machine learning techniques, and cheap and efficient communication methods, modern political professionals are able to identify likely supporters, understand their issues of interest and concern, make direct appeals with micro-targeted messages, and mobilize these constituencies to donate, volunteer, turnout, mobilize, and vote accordingly. Without a doubt, big data has the potential to inform strategic decision-making across multiple aspects of politics. In this course, students will learn about the range of big data sources that can be gathered and aggregated, including public data, traditional and social media data, consumer and transactional data, web data, and data from machines and sensors. Students will become familiar with the ways in which both structured and unstructured data can be used to gain insights about political actors’ sentiments, attitudes, and opinions and to develop strategies to predict and prompt behavior.