Joan C Timoneda
Biographic Data
| ID | 346299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joan C Timoneda |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joan C |
| FAMILY NAME | Timoneda |
| SIGNATURE | TIMONEDA J C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7057-872X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Rolling Memory
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Machines Do See Color
Extant work has identified two discursive forms of racism: overt and covert. While both forms have received attention in scholarly work, research on covert racism has been limited. Its subtle and context-specific nature has made it difficult to systematically identify covert racism in text, especially in large corpora. In this article, we first propose a theoretically driven and generalizable process to identify and classify covert and overt raci…
Is ChatGPT conservative or liberal? A novel approach to assess ideological stances and biases in generative LLMs
Extant work shows that generative AI such as GPT-3.5 and perpetuate social stereotypes and biases. A less explored source of bias is ideology: do GPT models take ideological stances on politically sensitive topics? We develop a novel approach to identify ideological bias and show that it can originate in both the training data and the filtering algorithm. Using linguistic variation across countries with contrasting political attitudes, we evaluat…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
The trajectories of personalization
Can Social Media Help Incumbents Subvert Democracy
Can leaders' use of social media contribute to democratic backsliding? Extant research concludes that political leaders use social media mostly as a broadcasting tool and to engage in limited substantive dialogue. In this article, we propose a supply-side theory of how social media may contribute to the processes associated with democratic backsliding. We argue that incumbents use Twitter (X), among other purposes, to dynamically discover the pol…
Revisiting the Personalism and Economic Performance Debate
I revisit the debate around personalism and economic performance in dictatorships and the stylized fact that personalist regimes produce poor economic outcomes. Conceiving of and measuring personalism as a time-varying trait of autocratic rule as opposed to a regime typology, I find that many regimes with high personalism scores perform quite well in terms of both gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and growth. Only regimes at the highest lev…
Et Tu, Brute? Wealth Inequality and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Replacement
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
The Rush to Personalize
How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that f…
Spikes and Variance
Google search is ubiquitous, and Google Trends (GT) is a potentially useful access point for big data on many topics the world over. We propose a new ‘variance-in-time’ method for forecasting events using GT. By collecting multiple and overlapping samples of GT data over time, our algorithm leverages variation both in the mean and the variance of a search term in order to accommodate some idiosyncracies in the GT platform. To elucidate our approa…
Estimating group fixed effects in panel data with a binary dependent variable
Wealth wars
Why are democracies backsliding? I contend that a large productivity gap between economic groups motivates those with low productivity to capture the state for rent-seeking. They assess their relative position as weak and are willing to sacrifice certain democratic guarantees in exchange for favorable policies. Erosion takes two forms. (1) With high inter-class inequality and a large productivity gap among economic industries, losing economic eli…
Institutions as Signals
Formal institutions in dictatorship are known to improve authoritarian governance and promote power-sharing. Yet institutions also act as tools of information propagation and can be used by autocrats for signaling purposes. In this article, I argue that in times of weakness, dictators follow an expand-and-signal strategy, expanding the ruling coalition to decrease the relative power of coup plotters and then create visible formal institutions to …
Estimating group fixed effects in panel data with a binary dependent variable
The Rush to Personalize
How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that f…
Spikes and Variance
Google search is ubiquitous, and Google Trends (GT) is a potentially useful access point for big data on many topics the world over. We propose a new ‘variance-in-time’ method for forecasting events using GT. By collecting multiple and overlapping samples of GT data over time, our algorithm leverages variation both in the mean and the variance of a search term in order to accommodate some idiosyncracies in the GT platform. To elucidate our approa…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
Institutions as Signals
Formal institutions in dictatorship are known to improve authoritarian governance and promote power-sharing. Yet institutions also act as tools of information propagation and can be used by autocrats for signaling purposes. In this article, I argue that in times of weakness, dictators follow an expand-and-signal strategy, expanding the ruling coalition to decrease the relative power of coup plotters and then create visible formal institutions to …
Rolling Memory
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Wealth wars
Why are democracies backsliding? I contend that a large productivity gap between economic groups motivates those with low productivity to capture the state for rent-seeking. They assess their relative position as weak and are willing to sacrifice certain democratic guarantees in exchange for favorable policies. Erosion takes two forms. (1) With high inter-class inequality and a large productivity gap among economic industries, losing economic eli…
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
Institutions as Signals
Formal institutions in dictatorship are known to improve authoritarian governance and promote power-sharing. Yet institutions also act as tools of information propagation and can be used by autocrats for signaling purposes. In this article, I argue that in times of weakness, dictators follow an expand-and-signal strategy, expanding the ruling coalition to decrease the relative power of coup plotters and then create visible formal institutions to …
Estimating group fixed effects in panel data with a binary dependent variable
Wealth wars
Why are democracies backsliding? I contend that a large productivity gap between economic groups motivates those with low productivity to capture the state for rent-seeking. They assess their relative position as weak and are willing to sacrifice certain democratic guarantees in exchange for favorable policies. Erosion takes two forms. (1) With high inter-class inequality and a large productivity gap among economic industries, losing economic eli…
Spikes and Variance
Google search is ubiquitous, and Google Trends (GT) is a potentially useful access point for big data on many topics the world over. We propose a new ‘variance-in-time’ method for forecasting events using GT. By collecting multiple and overlapping samples of GT data over time, our algorithm leverages variation both in the mean and the variance of a search term in order to accommodate some idiosyncracies in the GT platform. To elucidate our approa…
Et Tu, Brute? Wealth Inequality and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Replacement
How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador
How does the coordination strategy of interest groups change during a crisis? Shocks reduce an economy's resource pool and increase the competition for what is available. Interest groups participate in the policy-making process by lobbying legislators. In times of crisis, we argue, interest groups lobbying Congress coordinate in cohesive industry-wide communities led by key actors. Rather than lobbying for narrow policy privileges, interest group…
The Rush to Personalize
How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that f…
Revisiting the Personalism and Economic Performance Debate
I revisit the debate around personalism and economic performance in dictatorships and the stylized fact that personalist regimes produce poor economic outcomes. Conceiving of and measuring personalism as a time-varying trait of autocratic rule as opposed to a regime typology, I find that many regimes with high personalism scores perform quite well in terms of both gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and growth. Only regimes at the highest lev…
Is ChatGPT conservative or liberal? A novel approach to assess ideological stances and biases in generative LLMs
Extant work shows that generative AI such as GPT-3.5 and perpetuate social stereotypes and biases. A less explored source of bias is ideology: do GPT models take ideological stances on politically sensitive topics? We develop a novel approach to identify ideological bias and show that it can originate in both the training data and the filtering algorithm. Using linguistic variation across countries with contrasting political attitudes, we evaluat…
Bert, RoBerta, or DeBerta? Comparing Performance Across Transformers Models in Political Science Text
The trajectories of personalization
Can Social Media Help Incumbents Subvert Democracy
Can leaders' use of social media contribute to democratic backsliding? Extant research concludes that political leaders use social media mostly as a broadcasting tool and to engage in limited substantive dialogue. In this article, we propose a supply-side theory of how social media may contribute to the processes associated with democratic backsliding. We argue that incumbents use Twitter (X), among other purposes, to dynamically discover the pol…
Rolling Memory
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation tasks, which is of interest to social scientists. The most commonly used approaches, zero-shot and few-shot learning, do not sufficiently exploit the in-context learning capabilities of these models. Extant work demonstrates that allowing these models to retain memory throughout the annotation task increases performance considerably. In this article, we propos…
Machines Do See Color
Extant work has identified two discursive forms of racism: overt and covert. While both forms have received attention in scholarly work, research on covert racism has been limited. Its subtle and context-specific nature has made it difficult to systematically identify covert racism in text, especially in large corpora. In this article, we first propose a theoretically driven and generalizable process to identify and classify covert and overt raci…
Political science (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Democracy (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Business (3 works) · Computational and Text Analysis Methods (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works)