Haofeng Ma

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at The University of Iowa. As a comparative politics scholar, I study issues in public opinion, political linguistics, ethnicity and migration, and political economy from a cross-national perspective. Methodologically, I employ a wide range of statistical and computational methods in my studies, particularly spatio-temporal statistics, Bayesian statistics, natural language processing, GIS, and causal inference.

I am completing my Ph.D. dissertation, Native Tongue, Language Policy, and Political Attitudes, and expect to defend it by December 2024. My dissertation is a pioneering study systematically theorizing and examining the role of language in shaping individual political attitudes across countries. Drawing from cross-national survey data and applying computational linguistics methods, my dissertation reveals that the diversity of mother tongues—and the extent to which this diversity is permitted by the state's language policy—substantially shapes citizens' general attitudes toward the nation-state and its various specific political institutions.

I am also a member of the Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion (DCPO) Lab led by Frederick Solt. DCPO advances the study of public opinion by presenting a state-of-the-art model to measure latent variables of public opinion from available cross-national and national survey data, contributing to the field by addressing problems of sparse and incomparable data and investigating the dynamics of significant public opinion issues.