DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

Interests

Research Interest(s): Alexander Coppock's current work assesses the generalizability of empirical research findings through meta-reanalysis.

Program Area(s): Methods; American Politics

Regional Specialization(s): United States

Subfield Specialties: Experimental Methods; Public Opinion, Political Communication, and Political Participation

Biography

Coppock earned his PhD in political science from Columbia University in 2016, then served on the political science faculty at Yale University until joining Northwestern University in 2025.

He is the author of Persuasion in Parallel (winner of the 2024 Robert Lane Best Book Award), which synthesizes evidence from 23 randomized experiments to show that even groups that differ tremendously in their baseline attitudes change their minds in response to new information quite similarly. Coppock is also the coauthor of Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign (winner of the 2024 APSA Experimental Section Best Book Award), a research design textbook that introduces a language for describing research designs and an algorithm for evaluating their properties.

The goal of his current work is to show how a specific research design ("meta-reanalysis") represents a path to the kind of generalized causal inferences that social scientists would ideally like to draw but frequently cannot. A meta-reanalysis proceeds by obtaining original study datasets, reanalyzing the common targets with common tools, and then meta-analyzing the resulting estimates. When successful, this approach shows us how to generalize within similar contexts and across dissimilar contexts. When unsuccessful, a meta-reanalysis can demonstrate that we do not yet know how to generalize, either because we have too few studies or because we do not know how to account for the heterogeneity in the estimates.

To date, Coppock and his colleagues have applied meta-reanalysis to employment audit studies of gender-based discrimination, experiments that measure the effects of party cues on policy preferences, candidate choice experiments, experiments that estimate the effects of religious messages on political attitudes, and experimental investigations of perspective taking.

Books

• Alexander Coppock. Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics. Chicago Studies in American Politics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2022 alexandercoppock.com/coppock_2022
• Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock, and Macartan Humphreys. Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2023 book.declaredesign.org

Select Publications

• Soubhik Barari, Alexander Coppock, Matthew H Graham, and Zoe Padgett. "Did Trump's indictments rally his base? Evidence from the counterfactual format." Public Opinion Quarterly, 88(4):1216–1233, 02 2024 doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/csh8g
• Luke Hewitt, David Broockman, Alexander Coppock, Ben M. Tappin, James Slezak, Valerie Coffman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Mohammad Hamidian. "How experiments help campaigns persuade voters: Evidence from hundreds of campaigns' own experiments." American Political Science Review, 118(4):2021–2039, 2024 doi.org/10.1017/S0003055423001387
• Alexander Coppock, Kimberly Gross, Ethan Porter, Emily Thorson, and Thomas J. Wood. "Conceptual Replication of Four Key Findings about Factual Corrections and Misinformation During the 2020 U.S. Election: Evidence from Panel Survey Experiments." British Journal of Political Science, 53(4):1328–1341, 2023 doi.org/10.1017/S0007123422000631
• Diana Roxana Galos and Alexander Coppock. "Gender composition predicts gender bias: A meta-reanalysis of hiring discrimination audit experiments." Science Advances, 9(18):1–11, 2023 doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ade7979
• Minali Aggarwal, Jennifer Allen, Alexander Coppock, Dan Frankowski, Solomon Messing, Kelly Zhang, James Barnes, Andrew Beasley, H. Hantman, and Sylvan Zheng. 2023. "A 2 Million-Person, Campaign-Wide Field Experiment Shows How Digital Advertising Affects Voter Turnout." Nature Human Behavior, 7:332–341, 2023 doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01487-4