Sebastián Vallejo Vera

About Me

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. I am also the director of the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science - México (iLCSS) and a Research Fellow at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute (University of Houston). Previously, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston and an Assistant Profesor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, México. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Research Interest

My research explores the relationship between gendered political institutions and representation, and racial identity and racism in Latin America. I am particularly interested in the gendered barriers in political institutions, and the strategic reaction of political actors when encountering these barriers. My methodological work applies novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) to a wide variety of text data, from legislative speeches to tweets, to answer substantive questions about gender, racism, and politics.

Links to my CV and Google Scholar

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  1. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “Rage in the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media.” Latin American Politics and Society (2023): 65(1), 74-100. doi:10.1017/lap.2022.25. DOI PDF

  2. Alemán, Eduardo, Juan Pablo Micozzi, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech.” Political Research Quarterly (2022): 10659129221119200. DOI PDF

  3. Abad, Angelica, Raul Aldaz Pena, Diana Davila Gordillo, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “An Unwelcomed Deja-vu: Ecuadorian Politics in 2021.” Revista de Ciencia Política 42, no. 2 (2022): 281-308. DOI PDF

  4. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián, and Analía Gómez Vidal. “The politics of interruptions: Gendered disruptions of legislative speeches.” The Journal of Politics 84, no. 3 (2022): 1384-1402. DOI PDF Replication Data Media

  5. Currin, Christopher Brian, Sebastián Vallejo Vera, and Ali Khaledi-Nasab. “Depolarization of echo chambers by random dynamical nudge.” Scientific Reports 12, no. 1 (2022): 1-13. DOI PDF

  6. Abad Cisneros, Angélica, Raúl Aldaz Peña, Diana Dávila Gordillo, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Believe in me: parties’ strategies during a pandemic, evidence from Ecuador.” Journal of Politics in Latin America 13, no. 3 (2021): 419-441. DOI PDF

  7. Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Will I die of coronavirus? Google Trends data reveal that politics determine virus fears.” Plos one 16, no. 10 (2021): e0258189. DOI PDF Media

  8. Calvo, Ernesto, Paula Clerici, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Ciencia y política en tiempos del covid-19.” Política y gobierno 28, no. 2 (2021). HTTP PDF

  9. Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from Ecuador.” The Journal of Legislative Studies (2021): 1-39. DOI PDF

  10. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “By invitation only: On Why Do politicians bring interest groups into committees.” The Journal of Legislative Studies (2021): 1-38. DOI PDF

  11. McDermott, Monika L., Douglas Schwartz, and Sebastian Vallejo Vera. “Talking the talk but not walking the walk: Public reactions to hypocrisy in political scandal.” American Politics Research 43, no. 6 (2015): 952-974. DOI PDF

Book Chapters

  1. Vidal, Analía Gómez, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera, ‘Ecuador: Individual Incentives and the Gendered Path to Power’, in Hanna Back, Marc Debus, and Jorge M. Fernandes (eds), The Politics of Legislative Debates (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Nov. 2021), DOI PDF

Books

  1. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. 2018. Angostura, 30-S y la (re)militarización de la seguridad interna en Ecuador. Corporación Editora Nacional – Ecuador: 978-9978-84-997-2. PDF

Working Papers

  1. Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “BERT, RoBERTa or DeBERTa? Comparing Performance Across Transformer Models in Political Science Text.” Conditionally Accepted: Journal of Politics. PDF

  2. Hellmueller, Lea, Lindita Camaj, Peggy Lindner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “US Primary Debates in Bilingual Online Spaces: The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse.” R&R: Digital Journalism

  3. Hellmueller, Lea, Lindita Camaj, Peggy Lindner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “The Democratic Value of Uncivil Talk and Strategic Game Reporting: A Computational Analysis of Facebook Conversations During the 2020 U.S. Primary Debates.” R&R: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

  4. Dávila Gordillo, Diana, Joan C. Timoneda, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Machines Do See Color: How Transformers Outperform Other Approaches in Classifying Overt and Covert Racism in Text.” R&R: Journal of Politics

  5. Alemán, Eduardo, Tiffany Barnes, Juan Pablo Micozzi, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “The Role of Gender in Speech Participation: Evidence from Chile.” Working Paper

  6. Alemán, Eduardo, Pablo Valdivieso Kastner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Electoral Reform and Legislative Incentives: Constituency Representation in Ecuador.” Working Paper

  7. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “Performance of Maximum Likelihood Fixed Effects Estimation in Panel Data with Sample Selection Bias.” Under Review

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