José Javier is an Applied Research Statistician with the Empirical Research Services Department at Harvard Law School. His research asks how formal institutions and informal power structures jointly determine who has political voice, and at what cost. His work spans four connected areas: (1) racial and gendered inequality in elite institutions; (2) electoral systems and institutional design; (3) bureaucracy, implementation, and accountability; and (4) political representation and racialized identity.
Methodologically, his work draws on causal inference, computational social science, and measurement theory, with expertise in machine learning and natural language processing for political text and administrative data. His research has been published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Public Health, and the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Prior to joining HLS, he was a Survey Statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center.
He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach.