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Most of my research focuses on democracy and
particularly, on elections.
And I try to understand where democracy works, where it
tends to go wrong, and how to fix it.
Mr. Nixon, would you like to comment on that statement?
I have no comment.
People have long since feared that television would
exacerbate the tendency for people to
vote based on apearance.
And so we examine that by looking at people who watch a
great deal of television, and see if they focus more on
candidate's faces when they go to vote and vote for the
attractive candidates.
And that's exactly what we find with an interesting
twist, which is that a tendency of watching more
television to make you vote based on candidate's faces
only occurs among people who don't
know much about politics.
And it's consistent with the story that when voters do
learn more about politics and more about candidates, they
cast more informed votes.
MIT is just a fascinating place to work.
We have lots of people studying democracy and war and
public policy from lots of different angles.
And my own work tends to be statistical and data-driven
and also experimental.
On their own, I think both qualitative and quantitative
analysis can go off in the wrong direction, and I think
one of the great things about MIT and about the best work in
the social sciences is that it often combines the two.