Alexander Coppock
Associate Professor of Political Science
PhD, Political Science, Columbia University, 2016
Alexander Coppock is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institution for Policy Research. He is the author of Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds About Politics which synthesizes evidence from 23 randomized experiments to show that even groups that differ tremendously in their baseline attitudes change their minds in response to new information quite similarly. Coppock is also the co-author of Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign, a research design textbook that introduces a language for describing research designs and an algorithm for evaluating their properties. His current work assesses the generalizability of empirical research findings through meta-reanalysis.
Current Research
Meta-Reanalysis: A Research Design for Generalized Social Scientific Inferences
The goal of this project is to show how a specific research design ("meta-reanalysis") represents a path to the kind of generalized causal inferences that social scientists would ideally like to draw but frequently cannot. A meta-reanalysis proceeds by obtaining original study datasets, reanalyzing the common targets with common tools, and then meta-analyzing the resulting estimates. When successful, this approach shows us how to generalize within similar contexts and across dissimilar contexts. When unsuccessful, a meta-reanalysis can demonstrate that we do not yet know how to generalize, either because we have too few studies or because we do not know how to account for the heterogeneity in the estimates.
To date, Coppock and his colleagues have applied meta-reanalysis to employment audit studies of gender-based discrimination, experiments that measure the effects of party cues on policy preferences, candidate choice experiments, experiments that estimate the effects of religious messages on political attitudes, and experimental investigations of perspective taking.
Selected Publications
Books
Blair, G., A. Coppock, and M. Humphreys. 2023. Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign. Princeton University Press.
Coppock, A. 2022. Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds About Politics. University of Chicago Press.
Journal Articles
Barari, S., A. Coppock, M. H. Graham, and Z. Padgett. 2024. Did Trump’s Indictments Rally His Base? Evidence from the Counterfactual Format. Public Opinion Quarterly 88(4):1216–33.
Hewitt, L., D. Broockman, A. Coppock, B. M. Tappin, J. Slezak, V. Coffman, N. Lubin, and M. Hamidian. 2024. How Experiments Help Campaigns Persuade Voters: Evidence from Hundreds of Campaigns’ Own Experiments. American Political Science Review 118(4):2021–39.
Coppock, A., K. Gross, E. Porter, E. Thorson, and T. J. Wood. 2023. Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings About Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 US Election: Evidence from Panel Survey Experiments. British Journal of Political Science 53(4):1328–41.
Galos, D. R. and A. Coppock. 2023. Gender Composition Predicts Gender Bias: A Meta-Re-Analysis of Hiring Discrimination Audit Experiments. Science Advances 9(18):1–11.
Aggarwal, M., J. Allen, A. Coppock, D. Frankowski, S. Messing, K. Zhang, J. Barnes, A. Beasley, H. Hantman, and S. Zheng. 2023. A 2 Million-Person, Campaign-Wide Field Experiment Shows How Digital Advertising Affects Voter Turnout. Nature Human Behavior 7:332–41.
