Robert Shaffer is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, working with Beth Simmons’ Borders and Boundaries group. He received a PhD in Government and an MS in Statistics and Data Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
Broadly, he studies formal institutional design, with a focus on American politics and international relations. Legal documents – such as laws, constitutions, or treaties – often contain institutional rules, which describe who can do what, when, and to whom. Unfortunately, dense legal texts are difficult for non-experts to interpret. In his work, he uses machine learning tools to unlock the information contained in these documents, which he uses to study the political and policy origins of formal institutional design choices.
His research has been published in Political Analysis and the Journal of Politics, among other outlets.