Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Hacking the Electorate
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.eitanhersh.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_cv_112016.pdf * http://politicalscience.yale.edu/people/eitan-hersh
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Not Listed in the LOC Authorities.
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Professor, political consultant, and writer. Yale University, assistant professor of political science.
AWARDS:Resident Fellow of Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to journals and media outlets, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Politics, Boston Globe, FiveThirtyEight, CommonWealth Magazine, PBS NewsHour, MPRNews, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
Eitan Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University. Hersh studies civic participation, election rules, campaign strategy, voting behavior, and election administration. He also teaches American politics and elections. He has published articles on politics, elections, election donors, political polarization, data availability in elections, and voting in various news outlets, including the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Journal of Politics, and PBS NewsHour. Hersh has also been an expert consultant in several election-related court cases. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a Resident Fellow of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Hersh’s 2015 book Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, examines the effects of information and technology on candidate behavior. Hersh often utilizes large databases of personal records to study political behavior. In the book, he explains how campaigns use microtargeting databases to persuade voters to show up at the polls. The most important factor is that states collect different types of data on voters. This means that campaigns have access to various data and information from public records gathered by local government from which to mine information on voters and voting habits. For example, some states record a voter’s race, while some do not.
As a result of the broad availability of public information, campaigns across the country perceive the electorate in diverse ways. Campaign strategies and voter coalitions vary across the country, and varying data policies in different regions of the country can influence voters and public officials differently. Noting that Hersh meticulously describes his data collection and methods, Jim Twombly added in Choice: “He also voices concerns for how such public data could be abused by elected officials.” Another problem is conflict of interest when public officials determine what data can be collected by election administrators and what data are made public.
What campaigns know about voters matters immeasurably. Campaigns are inexorably linked to their access to the personal information that citizens provide to the government when they register to vote, much more so than to any personal information they can glean about voters from social media or data on their buying habits. Hersh contends that political campaigns must adapt their strategies to account for the varying availability in voter information. Strategies should be more individually targeted in jurisdictions that provide more data on voters, rather than be targeted generally across a wide geographical area. The more targeted the campaign, the more successful the turnout of voters.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, Jim Twombly, review of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, p. 1241.
ONLINE
Department of Political Science Web site, http://politicalscience.yale.edu/ (March 31, 2017), faculty profile.
Eitan Hersh Home Page, http://www.eitanhersh.com (March 31, 2017), author profile and curriculum vitae.
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University,
and a Resident Fellow of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies
The focus of my writing and teaching is American politics. I study civic participation and the relationship between election rules, strategies, and the behavior of voters. Much of my work utilizes large databases of personal records to study political behavior.
My book, Hacking the Electorate, was published by Cambridge in 2015. My peer-reviewed articles have been published in venues such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some Public Writing
"The Most Dangerous Hobby," Boston Globe, May 3 2016.
"Donald Trump’s surprising rise sheds light on the perils of political hobbyism. It is clear that far too many people have been treating a high-stakes affair like a low-stakes one. That’s why they never saw Trump coming. When politics is treated like an unserious game, unserious candidates emerge."
"Everyone is sure their side is going to win, even when it loses big," Washington Post's Monkey Cage, November 7, 2016 (with Ryan Enos).
"The GOP's Jewish Donors are Abandoning Trump," FiveThirtyEight, September 21, 2016. (with Brian Schaffner)
"What the Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry can Teach Us about Political Polarization," FiveThirtyEight, August 11. 2016.
"How Many Republicans Marry Democrats?" FiveThirtyEight, June 28, 2016.
"With Trump in the Race, The Battleground is Everywhere," FiveThirtyEight, June 21, 2016.
"Hersh-Galvin: Round 2," CommonWealth Magazine, May 18 2016.
"How Democrats Suppress the Vote," FiveThirtyEight, November 3, 2015.
"Data Availability Determines Whether Campaigns Focus on the Middle or the Base," FiveThirtyEight, August 10, 2015.
Home » People » Eitan Hersh
Eitan Hersh
Eitan Hersh's picture
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Address:
77 Prospect St, Room C120
203-436-9061
eitan.hersh@yale.edu
Education
Ph.D., Harvard, 2011
Personal Website
http://www.eitanhersh.com/
Bio
Eitan Hersh is Assistant Professor of Political Science. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2011. His teaching and research focus on elections in the United States. Hersh studies campaign strategy, voting behavior, and election administration. His current work examines the effects of information and technology on candidate behavior.
Articles:
2016-05-03 - “The Most Dangerous Hobby”. The Boston Globe, Opinion, Ideas.
Video
2014-11-03 - ISPS Midterm 2014: Expert Perspectives and Predictions
2014-02-18 - How “Microtargeting” Works In Political Campaigns - PBS News Hour
Audio
2012-08-07 - When Voter Microtargeting Fails A Campaign - MPRNews
2012-07-24 - Campaign 2012 Hits Your Inbox
For Office Hours, click here.
Hersh, Eitan D.: Hacking the electorate: how campaigns
perceive voters
Jim Twombly
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1241.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Hersh, Eitan D. Hacking the electorate: how campaigns perceive voters. Cambridge, 2015. 261p bibl index ISBN 9781107102897 cloth, $85.00;
ISBN 9781107501164 pbk, $29.99; ISBN 9781316310960 ebook, $24.00
53-3739
JK2281
2014-46688 CIP
This reviewer worked with voter registration data in campaigns for many years and was intrigued by Hacking the Electorate. Hersh's main
interest is demonstrating how campaigns adapt strategies to the varying availability of information in voter registration databases from state to
state. These strategies are more individually oriented in jurisdictions where more data is available or more geographically oriented in jurisdictions
where certain bits of data are lacking in the public record. For example, some states require racial identity in their registration data, and others do
not. In states that do not require it, campaigns have to rely on privately collected data to make best guesses about voter identity. Hersh
demonstrates that these adaptive strategies result in different levels of turnout from one jurisdiction to another--that is, individual appeals to
voters work better than generic geographic appeals. He meticulously describes his data collection and methods. He also voices concerns for how
such public data could be abused by elected officials and the inherent conflict of interest in those officials' determining what data election
administrators collect and what is made public. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections.--Jim
Twombly, Elmira College
3/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1488750488286 2/2
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Twombly, Jim. "Hersh, Eitan D.: Hacking the electorate: how campaigns perceive voters." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,
Apr. 2016, p. 1241. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661870&it=r&asid=079e98f814ef9009a1c3100db52b35c7. Accessed 5 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661870