Hane Lee

they/them
PhD Candidate in Statistics
Columbia University
hane.lee (at) columbia.edu







prof_pic



Hi! I am a PhD candidate in the Statistics Department at Columbia University, advised by Michael Sobel. My first name is pronounced [Hayn], and my pronouns are they/them.

My research focuses on the intersection of statistics and American politics. Methodologically, I have been working on developing new measures of ideological and affective polarization using the Wasserstein distance and combining the ideological and social interpretations of roll-call votes using a fused latent factor and network model. Substantively, I am interested public opinion, political behavior, and race, ethnicity, and politics.

Before coming to Columbia, I was at MIT Media Lab’s Opera of the Future group for an MS, where I designed interactive AR musical experiences and helped produce hybrid acoustic+digital musical performances. I also received a BS from MIT in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Music.



News

[May 2024] I will be presenting my paper on the Wasserstein Bipolarization Index at PolMeth 2024.

[May 2023] I will be presenting a poster on the fused latent factor and graphical modeling of roll-call votes at PolMeth 2023.


Research

Preprint. Hane Lee, Michael Sobel (2024). “The Wasserstein Bipolarization Index: A New Measure of Public Opinion Polarization, with an Application to Cross-Country Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination Mandates”.

Abstract Although the topic of opinion polarization receives much attention from the media, public opinion researchers and political scientists, the phenomenon itself has not been adequately characterized in either the lay or academic literature. To study opinion polarization among the public, researchers compare the distributions of respondents to survey questions or track the distribution of responses to a question over time using ad-hoc methods and measures such as visual comparisons, variances, and bimodality coefficients. To remedy this situation, we build on the axiomatic approach in the economics literature on income bipolarization, specifying key properties a measure of bipolarization should satisfy: in particular, it should increase as the distribution spreads away from a center toward the poles and/or as clustering below or above this center increases. We then show that measures of bipolarization used in public opinion research fail to satisfy one or more of these axioms. Next, we propose a p-Wasserstein polarization index that satisfies the axioms we set forth. Our index measures the dissimilarity between an observed distribution and a distribution with all the mass clustered on the lower and upper endpoints of the scale. We use our index to examine bipolarization in attitudes toward governmental COVID-19 vaccine mandates across 11 countries, finding the U.S and U.K are most polarized, China, France and India the least polarized, while the others (Brazil, Australia, Columbia, Canada, Italy, Spain) occupy an intermediate position.


Working paper. Hane Lee, Andrew Davison, Zhiliang Ying. “A Fused Ideological and Social Model of Roll-Call Votes”.

Abstract Coming soon!


Chris Andrade, Jonathan Auerbach, Icaro Bacelar, Hane Lee, Angela Tan, Mariana Vazquez, and Owen Ward (2023). “Does it pay to park in front of a fire hydrant?”. Significance 20(1), pp. 28–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrssig/qmad007.



Teaching

Instructor (at Columbia University)

Teaching Assistant (at Columbia University)

Graduate

Undergraduate