Hane Lee

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







prof_pic



Hi! I am a final year 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 political science, motivated by substantive questions from American politics–especially in public opinion, political polarization, and race, ethnicity, and politics. To operationalize and measure political phenomena, I apply diverse statistical methods: optimal transport, latent factor models, network theory, optimization, causal inference, and more. The topics I have been working on include developing new measures of ideological and affective polarization using the Wasserstein distance and measuring congressional social ties from roll call votes. I am also interested in studying statistical methods related to race from a critical theory perspective.

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

[Sep 2025] I will be presenting my paper on measuring public opinion with Wasserstein distance at APSA 2025.

[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 and Michael Sobel (2024). “Measuring Public Opinion: “The Wasserstein Bipolarization Index”, with Application to Cross-National Attitudes Toward Mandatory Vaccination for COVID-19.”

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, and Zhiliang Ying. “Measuring Social Ties from Roll Call Votes: A Fused Latent Factor and Social Network Approach”.

Abstract Congressional social ties influence legislative processes and outcomes, but measuring these ties presents a significant challenge. Recent research has adopted social network models to assess congressional social, but existing applications are limited in that they rely on indirect measurements using proxy relations, such as cosponsorship, and fail to account for party influence or ideological preferences of legislators, which may be more decisive factors. In this paper, we aim to directly measure social ties from roll call votes while taking account of partisan-ideological preferences. We combine the partisan-ideological and social approaches to roll call analysis through a fused latent factor and social network model. This model decomposes the variation in votes explained by the partisan-ideological factors from that of the social network, while prioritizing the former. Applying the model to the Senate, we find that the fitted latent factors capture known partisan and ideological patterns from previous literature, while social networks reflect notable friendships and geographical proximity.


Working paper. Yuki Atsusaka, Diana Da In Lee, and Hane Lee. “Racial Electoral Margin: Quantifying Electoral Competitiveness in Multi-Racial Elections”.

Abstract Research on minority representation has long focused on the presence of minority winners as the key outcome or independent variable. Despite its usefulness, we show that it marginalizes the information about how closely minority candidates get elected relative to their majority counterparts, preventing more nuanced understandings of race and representation. We discuss an alternative quantity of interest called the racial electoral margin (REM), which measures not only the presence of racial minority winners but also the electoral competitiveness in multiracial elections on a continuous scale. After formalizing the concept in first-past-the-post, we provide empirical analyses of REM in American politics. Our work implies that examining electoral competitiveness, rather than the simple presence of minority candidates, captures the dynamic nature of racial politics and minority descriptive representation.


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.



Teaching

Instructor (at Columbia University)

Teaching Assistant (at Columbia University)

Graduate

Undergraduate

Tutor (at MIT HKN and Math Learning Center)

Undergraduate