Gary King is the Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard University. He also serves as Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He and his research group develop and apply empirical methods in many areas of social science research. Full bio and CV

Research Areas

  • Methods
    • Anchoring Vignettes (for interpersonal incomparability)
      Methods for interpersonal incomparability, when respondents (from different cultures, genders, countries, or ethnic groups) understand survey questions in different ways; for developing theoretical definitions of complicated concepts apparently definable only by example (i.e., "you know it when you see it").
    • Automated Text Analysis
      Automated and computer-assisted methods of extracting, organizing, understanding, conceptualizing, and consuming knowledge from massive quantities of unstructured text.
    • Causal Inference
      Methods for detecting and reducing model dependence (i.e., when minor model changes produce substantively different inferences) in inferring causal effects and other counterfactuals. Matching methods; "politically robust" and cluster-randomized experimental designs; causal bias decompositions.
    • Event Counts and Durations
      Statistical models to explain or predict how many events occur for each fixed time period, or the time between events. An application to cabinet dissolution in parliamentary democracies which united two previously warring scholarly literature. Other applications to international relations and U.S. Supreme Court appointments.
    • Ecological Inference
      Inferring individual behavior from group-level data: The first approach to incorporate both unit-level deterministic bounds and cross-unit statistical information, methods for 2x2 and larger tables, Bayesian model averaging, applications to elections, software.
    • Missing Data & Measurement Error
      Statistical methods to accommodate missing information in data sets due to scattered unit nonresponse, missing variables, or values or variables measured with error. Easy-to-use algorithms and software for multiple imputation and multiple overimputation for surveys, time series, and time series cross-sectional data. Applications to electoral, and other compositional, data.
    • Qualitative Research
      How the same unified theory of inference underlies quantitative and qualitative research alike; scientific inference when quantification is difficult or impossible; research design; empirical research in legal scholarship.
    • Rare Events
      How to save 99% of your data collection costs; bias corrections for logistic regression in estimating probabilities and causal effects in rare events data; estimating base probabilities or any quantity from case-control data; automated coding of events.
    • Survey Research
      How surveys work and a variety of methods to use with surveys. Surveys for estimating death rates, why election polls are so variable when the vote is so predictable, and health inequality.
    • Unifying Statistical Analysis
      Development of a unified approach to statistical modeling, inference, interpretation, presentation, analysis, and software; integrated with most of the other projects listed here.
  • Applications
    • Evaluating Social Security Forecasts
      The accuracy of U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) demographic and financial forecasts is crucial for the solvency of its Trust Funds, government programs comprising greater than 50% of all federal government expenditures, industry decision making, and the evidence base of many scholarly articles. Forecasts are also essential for scoring policy proposals, put forward by both political parties. Because SSA makes public little replication information, and uses ad hoc, qualitative, and antiquated statistical forecasting methods, no one in or out of government has been able to produce fully independent alternative forecasts or policy scorings. Yet, no systematic evaluation of SSA forecasts has ever been published by SSA or anyone else. We show that SSA's forecasting errors were approximately unbiased until about 2000, but then began to grow quickly, with increasingly overconfident uncertainty intervals. Moreover, the errors all turn out to be in the same potentially dangerous direction, each making the Social Security Trust Funds look healthier than they actually are. We also discover the cause of these findings with evidence from a large number of interviews we conducted with participants at every level of the forecasting and policy processes. We show that SSA's forecasting procedures meet all the conditions the modern social-psychology and statistical literatures demonstrate make bias likely. When those conditions mixed with potent new political forces trying to change Social Security and influence the forecasts, SSA's actuaries hunkered down trying hard to insulate themselves from the intense political pressures. Unfortunately, this otherwise laudable resistance to undue influence, along with their ad hoc qualitative forecasting models, led them to also miss important changes in the input data such as retirees living longer lives, and drawing more benefits, than predicted by simple extrapolations. We explain that solving this problem involves using (a) removing human judgment where possible, by using formal statistical methods -- via the revolution in data science and big data; (b) instituting formal structural procedures when human judgment is required -- via the revolution in social psychological research; and (c) requiring transparency and data sharing to catch errors that slip through -- via the revolution in data sharing & replication.An article at Barron's about our work.
    • Incumbency Advantage
      Proof that previously used estimators of electoral incumbency advantage were biased, and a new unbiased estimator. Also, the first systematic demonstration that constituency service by legislators increases the incumbency advantage.
    • Information Control by Authoritarian Governments
      Reverse engineering Chinese information controls -- the most extensive effort to selectively control human expression in the history of the world. We show that this massive effort to slow the flow of information paradoxically also conveys a great deal about the intentions, goals, and actions of the leaders. We downloaded all Chinese social media posts before the government could read and censor them; wrote and posted comments randomly assigned to our categories on hundreds of websites across the country to see what would be censored; set up our own social media website in China; and discovered that the Chinese government fabricates and posts 450 million social media comments a year in the names of ordinary people and convinced those posting (and inadvertently even the government) to admit to their activities. We found that the goverment does not engage on controversial issues (they do not censor criticism or fabricate posts that argue with those who disagree with the government), but they respond on an emergency basis to stop collective action (with censorship, fabricating posts with giant bursts of cheerleading-type distractions, responding to citizen greviances, etc.). They don't care what you think of them or say about them; they only care what you can do.
    • Mexican Health Care Evaluation
      An evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular program (designed to extend health insurance and regular and preventive medical care, pharmaceuticals, and health facilities to 50 million uninsured Mexicans), one of the world's largest health policy reforms of the last two decades. Our evaluation features a new design for field experiments that is more robust to the political interventions and implementation errors that have ruined many similar previous efforts; new statistical methods that produce more reliable and efficient results using fewer resources, assumptions, and data, as well as standard errors that are as much as 600% smaller; and an implementation of these methods in the largest randomized health policy experiment to date. (See the Harvard Gazette story on this project.)
    • Presidency Research; Voting Behavior
      Resolution of the paradox of why polls are so variable over time during presidential campaigns even though the vote outcome is easily predictable before it starts. Also, a resolution of a key controversy over absentee ballots during the 2000 presidential election; and the methodology of small-n research on executives.
    • Informatics and Data Sharing
      Replication Standards New standards, protocols, and software for citing, sharing, analyzing, archiving, preserving, distributing, cataloging, translating, disseminating, naming, verifying, and replicating scholarly research data and analyses. Also includes proposals to improve the norms of data sharing and replication in science.
    • International Conflict
      Methods for coding, analyzing, and forecasting international conflict and state failure. Evidence that the causes of conflict, theorized to be important but often found to be small or ephemeral, are indeed tiny for the vast majority of dyads, but are large, stable, and replicable wherever the ex ante probability of conflict is large.
    • Legislative Redistricting
      The definition of partisan symmetry as a standard for fairness in redistricting; methods and software for measuring partisan bias and electoral responsiveness; discussion of U.S. Supreme Court rulings about this work. Evidence that U.S. redistricting reduces bias and increases responsiveness, and that the electoral college is fair; applications to legislatures, primaries, and multiparty systems.
    • Mortality Studies
      Methods for forecasting mortality rates (overall or for time series data cross-classified by age, sex, country, and cause); estimating mortality rates in areas without vital registration; measuring inequality in risk of death; applications to US mortality, the future of the Social Security, armed conflict, heart failure, and human security.
    • Teaching and Administration
      Publications and other projects designed to improve teaching, learning, and university administration, as well as broader writings on the future of the social sciences.

Recent Papers

Population-scale Longitudinal Mapping of COVID-19 Symptoms, Behaviour and Testing

Population-scale Longitudinal Mapping of COVID-19 Symptoms, Behaviour and Testing
William E. Allen, Han Altae-Tran, James Briggs, Xin Jin, Glen McGee, Andy Shi, Rumya Raghavan, Mireille Kamariza, Nicole Nova, Albert Pereta, Chris Danford, Amine Kamel, Patrik Gothe, Evrhet Milam, Jean Aurambault, Thorben Primke, Weijie Li, Josh Inkenbrandt, Tuan Huynh, Evan Chen, Christina Lee, Michael Croatto, Helen Bentley, Wendy Lu, Robert Murray, Mark Travassos, Brent A. Coull, John Openshaw, Casey S. Greene, Ophir Shalem, Gary King, Ryan Probasco, David R. Cheng, Ben Silbermann, Feng Zhang, and Xihong Lin. 8/26/2020. “Population-scale Longitudinal Mapping of COVID-19 Symptoms, Behaviour and Testing.” Nature Human Behavior. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Article
Despite the widespread implementation of public health measures, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to spread in the United States. To facilitate an agile response to the pandemic, we developed How We Feel, a web and mobile application that collects longitudinal self-reported survey responses on health, behaviour and demographics. Here, we report results from over 500,000 users in the United States from 2 April 2020 to 12 May 2020. We show that self-reported surveys can be used to build predictive models to identify likely COVID-19-positive individuals. We find evidence among our users for asymptomatic or presymptomatic presentation; show a variety of exposure, occupational and demographic risk factors for COVID-19 beyond symptoms; reveal factors for which users have been SARS-CoV-2 PCR tested; and highlight the temporal dynamics of symptoms and self-isolation behaviour. These results highlight the utility of collecting a diverse set of symptomatic, demographic, exposure and behavioural self-reported data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities

Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities
David M. J. Lazer, Alex Pentland, Duncan J. Watts, Sinan Aral, Susan Athey, Noshir Contractor, Deen Freelon, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, Gary King, Helen Margetts, Alondra Nelson, Matthew J. Salganik, Markus Strohmaier, Alessandro Vespignani, and Claudia Wagner. 8/28/2020. “Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities.” Science, 369, 6507, Pp. 1060-1062. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Article
The field of computational social science (CSS) has exploded in prominence over the past decade, with thousands of papers published using observational data, experimental designs, and large-scale simulations that were once unfeasible or unavailable to researchers. These studies have greatly improved our understanding of important phenomena, ranging from social inequality to the spread of infectious diseases. The institutions supporting CSS in the academy have also grown substantially, as evidenced by the proliferation of conferences, workshops, and summer schools across the globe, across disciplines, and across sources of data. But the field has also fallen short in important ways. Many institutional structures around the field—including research ethics, pedagogy, and data infrastructure—are still nascent. We suggest opportunities to address these issues, especially in improving the alignment between the organization of the 20th-century university and the intellectual requirements of the field.
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How and Why Do You Make Those Lecture Videos?

How and Why Do You Make Those Lecture Videos?
Gary King. Working Paper. “How and Why Do You Make Those Lecture Videos?”. [Direct link to paper]Abstract

I recorded all my lectures for “Quantitative Social Science Methods, I” -- the first course in the Harvard Government Department’s graduate methods sequence -- and made them publicly available (on YouTube here). In response to lots of subsequent requests for details on the technologies and pedagogy I used, here’s a summary of what I figured out and what I am still working on. Some of the ideas below come from my research; others from my personal experiments; and the rest from great advice I got from others directly or indirectly. Details on my class are available at j.mp/G2001.

 

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Differentially Private Survey Research

Differentially Private Survey Research
Georgina Evans, Gary King, Adam D. Smith, and Abhradeep Thakurta. Working Paper. “Differentially Private Survey Research”.Abstract
Paper
Survey researchers have long sought to protect the privacy of their respondents via de-identification (removing names, addresses, and other directly identifying information) before analyzing or sharing data. Although these procedures obviously help in important circumstances, recent research demonstrates that they fail to protect survey respondents from intentional attempts at re-identification, a problem that threatens to  undermine vast survey enterprises in academia, government, and industry. This is especially a problem for political science because political beliefs are not only the subject of our survey questions and scholarship; they are key information respondents seek to keep private and elected representatives use to write privacy legislation. In this paper, we build on the concept of "differential privacy" to offer new survey research data sharing procedures with mathematical guarantees for protecting respondent privacy and statistical validity guarantees for social scientists analyzing differentially private data.  The cost of these new procedures is larger standard errors or confidence intervals, which can be overcome with somewhat larger sample sizes.
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Building an International Consortium for Tracking Coronavirus Health Status

Building an International Consortium for Tracking Coronavirus Health Status
Eran Segal, Feng Zhang, Xihong Lin, Gary King, Ophir Shalem, Smadar Shilo, William E. Allen, Yonatan H. Grad, Casey S. Greene, Faisal Alquaddoomi, Simon Anders, Ran Balicer, Tal Bauman, Ximena Bonilla, Gisel Booman, Andrew T. Chan, Ori Cohen, Silvano Coletti, Natalie Davidson, Yuval Dor, David A. Drew, Olivier Elemento, Georgina Evans, Phil Ewels, Joshua Gale, Amir Gavrieli, Benjamin Geiger, Iman Hajirasouliha, Roman Jerala, Andre Kahles, Olli Kallioniemi, Ayya Keshet, Gregory Landua, Tomer Meir, Aline Muller, Long H. Nguyen, Matej Oresic, Svetlana Ovchinnikova, Hedi Peterson, Jay Rajagopal, Gunnar Rätsch, Hagai Rossman, Johan Rung, Andrea Sboner, Alexandros Sigaras, Tim Spector, Ron Steinherz, Irene Stevens, Jaak Vilo, Paul Wilmes, and CCC (Coronavirus Census Collective). 8/2020. “Building an International Consortium for Tracking Coronavirus Health Status.” Nature Medicine, 26, Pp. 1161-1165. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Paper
Information is the most potent protective weapon we have to combat a pandemic, at both the individual and global level. For individuals, information can help us make personal decisions and provide a sense of security. For the global community, information can inform policy decisions and offer critical insights into the epidemic of COVID-19 disease. Fully leveraging the power of information, however, requires large amounts of data and access to it. To achieve this, we are making steps to form an international consortium, Coronavirus Census Collective (CCC, coronaviruscensuscollective.org), that will serve as a hub for integrating information from multiple data sources that can be utilized to understand, monitor, predict, and combat global pandemics. These sources may include self-reported health status through surveys (including mobile apps), results of diagnostic laboratory tests, and other static and real-time geospatial data. This collective effort to track and share information will be invaluable in predicting hotspots of disease outbreak, identifying which factors control the rate of spreading, informing immediate policy decisions, evaluating the effectiveness of measures taken by health organizations on pandemic control, and providing critical insight on the etiology of COVID-19. It will also help individuals stay informed on this rapidly evolving situation and contribute to other global efforts to slow the spread of disease. In the past few weeks, several initiatives across the globe have surfaced to use daily self-reported symptoms as a means to track disease spread, predict outbreak locations, guide population measures and help in the allocation of healthcare resources. The aim of this paper is to put out a call to standardize these efforts and spark a collaborative effort to maximize the global gain while protecting participant privacy.
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Survey Data and Human Computation for Improved Flu Tracking

Survey Data and Human Computation for Improved Flu Tracking
Stefan Wojcik, Avleen Bijral, Richard Johnston, Juan Miguel Lavista, Gary King, Ryan Kennedy, Alessandro Vespignani, and David Lazer. Forthcoming. “Survey Data and Human Computation for Improved Flu Tracking.” Nature Communications.Abstract
Paper
Supporting Information
While digital trace data from sources like search engines hold enormous potential for tracking and understanding human behavior, these streams of data lack information about the actual experiences of those individuals generating the data. Moreover, most current methods ignore or under-utilize human processing capabilities that allow humans to solve problems not yet solvable by computers (human computation). We demonstrate how behavioral research, linking digital and real-world behavior, along with human computation, can be utilized to improve the performance of studies using digital data streams. This study looks at the use of search data to track prevalence of Influenza-Like Illness (ILI). We build a behavioral model of flu search based on survey data linked to users’ online browsing data. We then utilize human computation for classifying search strings. Leveraging these resources, we construct a tracking model of ILI prevalence that outperforms strong historical benchmarks using only a limited stream of search data and lends itself to tracking ILI in smaller geographic units. While this paper only addresses searches related to ILI, the method we describe has potential for tracking a broad set of phenomena in near real-time.
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Evaluating COVID-19 Public Health Messaging in Italy: Self-Reported Compliance and Growing Mental Health Concerns

Evaluating COVID-19 Public Health Messaging in Italy: Self-Reported Compliance and Growing Mental Health Concerns
Soubhik Barari, Stefano Caria, Antonio Davola, Paolo Falco, Thiemo Fetzer, Stefano Fiorin, Lukas Hensel, Andriy Ivchenko, Jon Jachimowicz, Gary King, Gordon Kraft-Todd, Alice Ledda, Mary MacLennan, Lucian Mutoi, Claudio Pagani, Elena Reutskaja, Christopher Roth, and Federico Raimondi Slepoi. Working Paper. “Evaluating COVID-19 Public Health Messaging in Italy: Self-Reported Compliance and Growing Mental Health Concerns”. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Paper

Purpose: The COVID-19 death-rate in Italy continues to climb, surpassing that in every other country. We implement one of the first nationally representative surveys about this unprecedented public health crisis and use it to evaluate the Italian government’ public health efforts and citizen responses. 
Findings: (1) Public health messaging is being heard. Except for slightly lower compliance among young adults, all subgroups we studied understand how to keep themselves and others safe from the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Remarkably, even those who do not trust the government, or think the government has been untruthful about the crisis believe the messaging and claim to be acting in accordance. (2) The quarantine is beginning to have serious negative effects on the population’s mental health.
Policy Recommendations: Communications focus should move from explaining to citizens that they should stay at home to what they can do there. We need interventions that make staying at home and following public health protocols more desirable. These interventions could include virtual social interactions, such as online social reading activities, classes, exercise routines, etc. — all designed to reduce the boredom of long term social isolation and to increase the attractiveness of following public health recommendations. Interventions like these will grow in importance as the crisis wears on around the world, and staying inside wears on people.

Replication data for this study in dataverse

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Presentations

Empowering Social Science to Understand and Ameliorate Major Challenges of Human Society (Federal Interagency Conference on Social Science and Big Data), at Federal Interagency Conference on Social Science and Big Data, Wednesday, September 30, 2020:
Slides
Social scientists can understand and ameliorate some of the major challenges of human society by making new connections across academia, government, and industry; developing new methods of analyzing data, rather than merely watching big data get bigger; and ensuring they have the flexibility to ask new questions that arise in doing data analyses rather than sticking to the original ones posed. I make these points in discussions of research projects I've been lucky to lead across the US, China, Mexico, and Italy.
Statistically Valid Inferences from Privacy Protected Data (Google, Inc) Friday, September 18, 2020:
Slides

Unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of worries about privacy violations. We address this problem with a general-purpose data access and analysis system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for individuals who may be represented in the data, statistical guarantees for researchers seeking insights from it, and protection for society from some fallacious scientific conclusions. We build on the standard...

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Statistically Valid Inferences from Privacy Protected Data (Harvard, Privacy Tools Project), at Harvard University (via Zoom), Monday, April 20, 2020:
Slides

Unprecedented quantities of data that could help social scientists understand and ameliorate the challenges of human society are presently locked away inside companies, governments, and other organizations, in part because of worries about privacy violations. We address this problem with a general-purpose data access and analysis system with mathematical guarantees of privacy for individuals who may be represented in the data, statistical guarantees for researchers seeking insights from it, and protection for society from some fallacious scientific conclusions. We build on the standard...

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Books

Demographic Forecasting

Demographic Forecasting
Federico Girosi and Gary King. 2008. Demographic Forecasting. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Abstract

We introduce a new framework for forecasting age-sex-country-cause-specific mortality rates that incorporates considerably more information, and thus has the potential to forecast much better, than any existing approach. Mortality forecasts are used in a wide variety of academic fields, and for global and national health policy making, medical and pharmaceutical research, and social security and retirement planning.

As it turns out, the tools we developed in pursuit of this goal also have broader statistical implications, in addition to their use for forecasting mortality or other variables with similar statistical properties. First, our methods make it possible to include different explanatory variables in a time series regression for each cross-section, while still borrowing strength from one regression to improve the estimation of all. Second, we show that many existing Bayesian (hierarchical and spatial) models with explanatory variables use prior densities that incorrectly formalize prior knowledge. Many demographers and public health researchers have fortuitously avoided this problem so prevalent in other fields by using prior knowledge only as an ex post check on empirical results, but this approach excludes considerable information from their models. We show how to incorporate this demographic knowledge into a model in a statistically appropriate way. Finally, we develop a set of tools useful for developing models with Bayesian priors in the presence of partial prior ignorance. This approach also provides many of the attractive features claimed by the empirical Bayes approach, but fully within the standard Bayesian theory of inference.

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Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies

Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies
Gary King, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, Gary King, Ori Rosen, and Martin A Tanner. 2004. Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
Complete Book
Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies brings together a diverse group of scholars to survey the latest strategies for solving ecological inference problems in various fields. The last half decade has witnessed an explosion of research in ecological inference – the attempt to infer individual behavior from aggregate data. The uncertainties and the information lost in aggregation make ecological inference one of the most difficult areas of statistical inference, but such inferences are required in many academic fields, as well as by legislatures and the courts in redistricting, by businesses in marketing research, and by governments in policy analysis.
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Video Lectures and Seminars

Gary King on Twitter