Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS)

10/16/2026

See the latest 2026 elections forecast for the US House and Senate in an interactive page published from a team led by Gary King, director of IQSS.

GaryKing.org/electit

By Danny Ebanks, Jonathan N. Katz, and Gary King. We make these forecasts (including all data, methods, and procedures) public because academics learn by making themselves vulnerable to being proven wrong.

10/12/2026

Support for single-payer health care is rising, and as the cost of health care and Medicare for All draw renewed attention this election season, IQSS affiliate David Cutler, Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics and dean of social science, evaluates its feasibility in JAMA Health Forum. Public support for a federal role in universal coverage is at its highest in two decades, but the debt to GDP ratio is steep—and a combination of tax increases and spending cuts would be needed to close the gap.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2854940

10/09/2026

Tyler VanderWeele, faculty director of the Human Flourishing Program at IQSS, explains to CBS News the harmful effects of holding a grudge, and how forgiveness has measurable benefits.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/letting-go-why-holding-onto-grudges-can-be-damaging/

Studies have shown that people who hold grudges have greater levels of cardiovascular trouble, and higher levels of depression and anxiety. But according to one survey, four out of five adults harbor some lingering resentment towards others, sometimes over the smallest of reasons. Correspondent Susa...

10/08/2026

Why hasn’t AI triggered mass layoffs? IQSS affiliate Raffaella Sadun, Wilson Professor of Business Administration, weighs in on a conversation about the fear of layoffs and the jobs potentially lost to AI automation, and why the disruption many predicted has not yet arrived.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/09/why-ai-hasnt-triggered-mass-layoffs-yet

Artificial intelligence can do some jobs already, but experts say CEOs have good reasons to keep humans on the payroll.

10/08/2026

Does the top of the ticket lift the whole slate?

IQSS affiliate Benjamin Schneer, associate professor of public policy, takes a closer look at the presumption that a stronger top-of-the-ticket candidate influences races for lower offices. Examining House elections from 1950 to 2022, he finds that voters respond to the person they are voting for rather than the name above them— though he notes the pattern may be weakening since 2010.

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/democracy-governance/does-top-ticket-influence-down-ballot-races

Research indicates that top-of-the-ticket candidates may not influence how voters view down-ballot candidates as much as conventional wisdom suggests.

10/07/2026

Thursday at 3pm: Adam Berinsky of MIT examines whether large language models can shift voter attitudes, presenting “Persuasion through the use of human–artificial intelligence dialogues” at this week’s Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy.

Drawing on pre-registered experiments run around the 2024 US presidential election and the 2025 Canadian federal and Polish presidential elections, Adam's research asks how far generative AI can actually move political opinion.

https://www.iq.harvard.edu/event/adam-berinsky-alesina-seminar

10/02/2026

US homeownership rates have held steady since 1970, but the geography underneath them has not. CGA researchers Connie Chen and SV Subramanian and coauthors examine homeownership and housing growth across the United States from 1970 to 2020, revealing growing regional disparities beneath a stable national rate.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2026.107455

10/02/2026

Dataverse 6.12 is now available, with new API capabilities, performance and security improvements, and a range of bug fixes.

https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/releases/tag/v6.12

Dataverse 6.12 Please note: We are investigating an issue ( #12724) where we suspect that new installations on PostgreSQL 16 will fail but it works fine on PostgreSQL 17. (Upgrading an existing Data...

10/01/2026

Of 435 congressional seats, only about 30 to 35 are genuinely competitive.

IQSS affiliate Kosuke Imai, Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of Government and of Statistics, explains how gerrymandering and geographic polarization are narrowing the map ahead of the 2026 midterms. His ALARM Project generates nonpartisan redistricting plans by algorithm and uses them as a baseline to measure how far enacted maps depart from neutral ones—finding a net Republican advantage of roughly two seats nationally, and about a 25% rise in safe districts as voters sort themselves residentially by party.

https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/how-much-will-gerrymandering-impact-2026-midterms

Harvard political scientist Kosuke Imai, PhD ’03, explains how redistricting and geographic polarization are making elections less competitive.

10/01/2026

This Friday and Saturday: the Center for Geographic Analysis turns 20, marking the anniversary with the 2026 CGA Conference, “Celebrating Geographic Analysis: Past, Present, and Future.” Two days of keynotes, talks, panels, and workshops bring together researchers from geography, the social sciences, and the humanities to examine the methods, questions, and data that impactful spatial research will require next.

https://gis.harvard.edu/2026-cga-conference