Politics Forum presents “Using AI to Measure Democracy” with Matthew Wilson, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina on March 27, 2026 at 12:30 pm in SSB 223.
How do you turn political reports into publishable data? We use AI and text analysis to convert Freedom House reports into evidence about when and how democracy changes. See how cutting-edge methods can help answer one of today’s biggest political questions—and build your own research skills.
Professor Wilson received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 2015 and joined the USC faculty in 2019. Professor Wilson is interested in explaining the impacts of political institutions and temporal dynamics in non-democratic settings. Some of his ongoing research projects focus on the mechanisms that support legislative strengthening and party institutionalization in autocracies and their relation to conflict and regime change. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Varieties of Democracy Project at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he has contributed to research on democratization.