Will Schulz

Will Schulz received his PhD in 2024 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where his doctoral research sought to resolve two seemingly contradictory facts of American politics: (1) most people hold moderate or mixed political views, and yet (2) online political discourse is (apparently) polarized.  Will's work includes both research and also the development of tools for data collection and analysis to facilitate that research.  In his dissertation, Will developed an original method for characterizing individuals' political speech, and for estimating preference falsification and self-censorship, using a survey experiment exploiting contemporary political catchphrases.  Most recently, he is focused on developing and implementing research projects with Argyle, which is a social media research tool adapted from the open-source Mastodon platform.  Currently, Will is most interested in studying why certain individuals abstain from expressing their political views online, and the role of recommendation algorithms in contributing to differences in rates of online political expression. He is a fellow at the Stanford Social Media Lab at the Cyber Policy Center.