An Unusual Path to Political Science
Throughout high school and college, Associate Professor of Political Science Nick Beauchamp was more interested in mathematics, philosophy, and literature than politics. While working on an MA in English literature at John Hopkins, his interests turned increasingly to digital humanities and politics, and after receiving his MA, he worked at the Carter Center doing election observation in various countries. While there, accusations of electoral fraud in Venezuela were coming to light, and Beauchamp was assigned the task of performing an analysis of the accusations. As many of the accusations were quantitative, he found himself searching for patterns within the electoral data using statistical methods. From there, he realized that he wanted to pursue political studies and quantitative research professionally. He went to graduate school to pursue a PhD in political science at New York University and graduated in 2012.
Much of Beauchamp’s research revolves around the intersection between public opinion, text data, and computational methods. Wanting to combine his early interest in philosophy with the more pressing political issues, Beauchamp strives to look beyond left vs. right political spectrums in his research, and explores patterns in the ways that people think about and discuss politics. He is interested in media bias in the reporting of politics, how politicians interact and address one another publicly, and how people engage with each other about politics over social media. His research also explores questions about the morality behind politics and political expression.
“Our political opinions are much more complex than we give them credit for.”
The Northeastern Difference
Professor Beauchamp began working at Northeastern in 2013 after learning more about Northeastern’s Department of Political Science and its intertwining of traditional political science practices with newer developments in the field, such as network and computational methods. His approach to teaching combines the course material with his other interests, such as philosophy and literature, centering around socratic methods and close reading of political texts. He urges students to break down texts in search of main ideas and encourages discussions on what they are reading, while maintaining an open mind and allowing their opinions to shift.
Beauchamp sways his students away from oppositional arguing, calling these class discussions “critical thinking exercises” and describing them as a process for the discovery of new ideas, noting that he often finds his own opinions shifting as he learns from students. During his time at CSSH, he has taught “Social Networks”, “The US Congress”, “Bayesian and Network Statistics”, “Introduction to Computational Statistics”, among other courses.
“One of the things I value most about teaching is this deliberative and exploratory process between students and the professor, in which you both are learning from each other. This back and forth way of learning helps develop the opinions of everyone taking part in the discussion.”
A Focus on Politics and Media
Currently, Beauchamp is working on several new projects, many of which center around the intersection between politics and media. Much of his newer research looks at AI and large language models to discover patterns that look beyond left vs. right ideologies, such as citizens’ stances and interactions, and questions of morality in political discourse.
Recently, he presented a paper to the American Political Science Association on how controversial political events are reported to the public. That paper is part of an ongoing project in which Beauchamp explores how the media chooses which events to report and how that reveals complex moral values.
What’s Next
Looking to the future, Professor Beauchamp hopes to explore new ways of characterizing how people talk about politics. He wants to look at both empirical and moral considerations of different political viewpoints to discover morally beneficial solutions to a myriad of issues. As for the field of political science, he is intrigued by how it has been impacted by newer developments in technology, specifically how the emergence of these technologies has made political scientists rethink foundational issues. An example is in the domain of AI, where there are questions about measuring or theoretically modeling the beliefs and values of it; this forces us to confront the fact that we don’t have great models of how ideology, personality, or moral values function in human minds either. Resolving these issues for AI, Beauchamp says, will require solving a number of deep open questions in psychology and social science.
“Political opinion is more complex than we often give it credit for, particularly given the current levels of polarization. But when looking at the variety of moral values, especially within partisan groups, we see much more variation and room for opinions to change. That said, one of the challenges of political science is taking these discoveries and figuring out how to use them to make the world a better place.”
