Political Analytics Hackathon

The 2017 Harvard Political Analytics Hackathon is an opportunity for people with an interest in data and politics to help tell the story of the 2016 election. Participants in the event will be put on teams consisting of Harvard students, data science and visualization professionals, and politics experts from the media or political sphere.

The event will take place on the afternoon and evening of Thursday, March 30, and select teams will present their results in a panel session at the conference on March 31.

Hackathon teams will use a dataset, provided by L2, to explore patterns of turnout and voting in the 2016 election. The data includes hundreds of variables containing information on demographics, consumer habits, voter registration, and electoral turnout for over 166 million Americans.

Teams will also be be the first to analyze the data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The 2016 version of the survey, which was conducted in two waves before and after Election Day, includes responses from roughly 60,000 Americans.

Harvard undergraduates who are interested in participating can apply here. The deadline for initial applications is 5pm, February 17. Please note that participation in the event will be limited to a small number of students who have shown an interest in American politics and have experience with statistical analysis (preferably in R or Stata).

If you have questions about the Hackaton, please contact Stephen Pettigrew at pettigrew@fas.harvard.edu.