Joshua Y. Lerner

Welcome to my website! I'm currently a Data Scientist and Research Methodologist at NORC at the University of Chicago, working in the Methods and Quantitative Social Sciences department, working on projects relating to natural language processing, machine learning, causal inference, and general statistical/methodological problems.

Previously, I was the Political Institutions and Public Choice Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Duke University and a Quantitative Methods Postdoctoral Scholar at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

My personal research focuses on American Politics, Congressional Politics, Text-as-Data, Causal Inference, Political Ideology, Machine Learning, and Judicial Politics.

I graduated with a Ph.D. (2017) in Political Science from Duke University. My dissertation focused on questions about where ideas in the legislative process come from, what determines which ideas succeed and which fail and what predicts which ones end up in law and which ones are discarded. This agenda encompasses multiple research areas, including congressional politics, judicial politics, interest groups, and political methodology. While much of my research has been on applying text-as-data methods to the study of political ideas, I am also working on other projects related to machine learning and causal inference more generally.