Sebastián Vallejo Vera

About Me

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

Research Interest

My research explores the relation 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.

You can find my CV here.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  1. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. Forthcoming. “Rage within the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media.” Latin American Politics and Society. Link to working paper

  2. Vallejo Vera , Sebastián (with Analía Gómez Vidal). Forthcoming. “The Politics of Interruptions: Gendered Disruptions of Legislative Speeches.” Journal of Politics. DOI PDF Replication Data

  3. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Angélica Abad, Raúl Aldaz, and Diana Dávila Gordillo). (2021). “Believe in me: Parties’ Strategies During a Pandemic, Evidence from Ecuador.” Journal of Politics in Latin America, 13(3):419-441. DOI PDF

  4. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Joan C. Timoneda). (2021). “Will I die of coronavirus? Google Trends data reveal that politics determine virus fears.” Plos one, 16(10), e0258189. DOI PDF

  5. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Ernesto Calvo and Paula Clerici). (2021). “Ciencia y política en tiempos del covid-19.” Política y gobierno, 28(2). HTTP PDF

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

  7. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. (2021). “By invitation only: on why do politicians bring interest groups into committees.” The Journal of Legislative Studies, 1-38. DOI PDF

  8. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Monika McDermott and Douglas Schwartz). (2015). “Talking the talk but not walking the walk: Public reactions to hypocrisy in political scandal.” American Politics Research, 43(6), 952-974. DOI PDF

Book Chapters

  1. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Analía Gómez Vidal). 2021. “Ecuador: Individual Incentives and the Gendered Path to Power” in: Back, Hanna, Marc Debus and Jorge M. Fernandes (Eds.). The Politics of Legislative Debates Around the World. Oxford University Press. 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. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Angélica Abad, Raúl Aldaz, and Diana Dávila Gordillo). “An Unwelcomed Deja-Vu: Ecuadorian politics in 2021.” (Revise and Resubmit) Revista de Ciencia Política.

  2. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Diana Dávila Gordillo and Joan C. Timoneda). “Machines Do See Color: How Transformers Outperform Other Approaches in Classifying Overt and Covert Racism in Text.” (Under Review).

  3. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Joan C. Timoneda). “Pay (Self-)Attention: How Transformer Models Increase Performance in Text Classification Tasks.” (Under Review).

  4. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Eduardo Alemán and Juan Pablo Micozzi). “Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech.” (Revise and Resubmit) Political Research Quarterly.

  5. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “Rage within the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media.” iLCSS Working Paper #9. (Revise and Resubmit) Latin American Politics and Society.

  6. Vallejo Vera, Sebastián (with Christopher Currin and Ali Khaledi-Nasab). “Depolarization of echo chambers by random dynamical nudge.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.04079. (Revise and Resubmit) Scientific Reports.

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

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