Isaac Mehlhaff

Isaac Mehlhaff is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute, Committee on Data Science, and Program in Political Economy at the University of Chicago.

His research is driven by substantive questions in public opinion and political psychology: How and why do citizens change their attitudes on political issues? Under what conditions can political discussion exacerbate or ameliorate mass polarization? How is polarization causally related to other features of government and society? He approaches his work primarily as a computational social scientist, using and developing methods in natural language processing, machine learning, and Bayesian modeling.

DSI Postdoctoral Scholar 2023-2024

Isaac Mehlhaff joined DSI as a postdoctoral scholar in August 2023. His research is driven by substantive questions in public opinion and political psychology: How and why do citizens change their attitudes on political issues? How do these attitude changes drive mass polarization? How is polarization causally related to other features of government and society? He investigates these questions by using and developing methods in natural language processing, Bayesian statistics, and causal inference, with a particular focus on high-quality measurement.

Isaac was part of the Data & Democracy initiative at DSI, with the goal of developing and deploying flexible chatbots to study political communication, persuasion, and misinformation. He holds a PhD and MA in political science from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in history, political science, and economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.