Annie Y. Chen

Annie Y. Chen

Data Scientist

Institute for State and Local Governance

Hi! I am a data scientist at the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance where I support the work of the NYPD Monitor and the NYPD Reform and Reinvention Collaborative. Before moving to New York, I was a quantitative social science researcher at Dartmouth College and a Bright Line Watch Fellow. I graduated with a Master’s degree in Political Science from McGill University in Montréal, Canada. I enjoy wrestling with social science questions.

Interests

  • Criminal justice reform
  • Online information consumption
  • Voting systems and voting behavior
  • Causal inference

Education

  • MA in Political Science, 2020

    McGill University

  • BA in Political Science; Criminology, 2017

    University of Toronto

Research

Discriminatory Immigration Bans Elicit Anti-Americanism in Targeted Communities: Evidence from Nigerian Expatriates (Journal of Experimental Political Science)

Do discriminatory US immigration policies affect foreign public opinion about Americans? When examining negative reactions to US actions perceived as bullying on the world stage, existing research has focused either on US policies that involve direct foreign military intervention or seek to influence foreign countries’ domestic economic policy or policies advocating minority representation. We argue that US immigration policies – especially when they are perceived as discriminatory – can similarly generate anti-American sentiment. We use a conjoint experiment embedded in a unique survey of Nigerian expatriates in Ghana. Comparing respondents before and after President Trump surpisingly announced a ban on Nigerian immigration to the United States, we find a large drop (13 percentage points) in Nigerian’s favorability towards Americans.

Exposure to Alternative & Extremist Content on YouTube

How harmful is YouTube? Critics worry that it plays an outsized role among technology platforms in exposing people to hateful or extreme ideas, while the platform claims to have substantially reduced the reach of what it calls “borderline content and harmful misinformation.”1 However, little is publicly known about who watches potentially harmful videos on YouTube, how much they watch, or the role of the site’s recommendations in promoting those videos to users. To answer these questions, we collected comprehensive behavioral data measuring YouTube video and recommendation exposure among a diverse group of survey participants. Using browser history and activity data, we examined exposure to extremist and white supremacist YouTube channels as well as to “alternative” channels that can serve as gateways to more extreme forms of content…

Partisanship, Personalisation of Politics, and Incumbency in Australia

What are the electoral advantages of current officeholders in a highly partisan environment? To answer this question, I evaluate overall incumbency effects and personal incumbency effects in Australian elections and find that incumbent parties receive a small boost in vote shares on average, but that this effect is asymmetric between parties in federal elections. By contrast, incumbent legislators who barely win an election tend to receive the same or even fewer votes than non-incumbents in the next election. I also find no evidence that incumbency advantages have increased over time in the face of eroding partisanship in Australia. These results suggest that party ties in Australia remain a salient feature of its political landscape despite the personalisation of politics.