Jake Bowers

Jake Bowers teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an associate professor of political science and statistics. His recent research in applied statistics and political methodology focuses on questions about statistical inference for causal effects in randomized experiments: for example, one paper engages with the problems of non-compliance, binary outcomes, and cluster-randomization, another grapples with the problem of propagation of experimental treatments across networks, and another proposes a way to increase the power of experiments to detect treatment effects using recent advances in machine learning. His recent research on political behavior has two main foci and groups of collaborators: with one group, he has been studying how people perceive their local communities using hand-drawn maps embedded in online surveys, and with another group collaborators, with another group he has launched a field experiment to assess the effects of a new Hausa-speaking television channel in Northern Nigeria on social norms about violence, inter-group tolerance, and the roles of women and youth in society. As an OES Fellow, he works on the Research Support Squad to help enhance the transparency and integrity of the research design and data analysis process of the team.