Hi! I’m Pia Deshpande — a PhD Candidate in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. I have a particular interest in how social media shapes American politics.
To that end, I am currently analyzing the results of a large field experiment (n = 2,148) I ran with Aaron Pope, a PhD Candidate in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. Pairing experimental evidence with digital trace data (over 130 million video exposures collected with 50 million unique URLS across watch histories), we examine what deactivating TikTok for one month may do to Americans’ political beliefs and well-being. With the wealth of watch history data at our disposal, we have also set out to describe the political landscape of the platform our participants engage with, with a specific eye to contact that blends entertainment and politics. Beyond this project, I am interested in how the internet changes (or does not change) people’s ability to engage in politics.
Prior to starting my PhD at Berkeley, I was a pre-doctoral researcher at the Cooperative Election Study (CES) and a research assistant at the MIT Election Lab. I also worked as a data journalist for the Associated Press during the 2020 election, and interned at CNN International in Hong Kong and POLITICO in D.C. In 2020, I earned a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Though I am not a journalist anymore, I continue to write for non-academic venues as a researcher. So far, I have published in The Monkey Cage and Lawfare.
During my time with the CES, I wrote tutorials for my students on how to use R. I wrote these tutorials before I even began graduate school, so I take only tenuous responsibility for the prose they contain. You can find them under tutorials .
You can contact me at pia_deshpande[at]berkeley[dot]edu.