Portrait of Olivier Bergeron-Boutin

I am a PhD student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. I hold an M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from McGill University in Montreal. I was previously a research associate at Dartmouth College and at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. I am interested in political behavior and political economy, with methodological interests in causal inference, survey research, and metascience. My research focuses on citizens’ attitudes toward democracy; expert forecasting; information consumption and social media; and political polarization.

You can find a copy of my CV here.

Publications

7. “Political Unfriending on Facebook: Evidence from over 180 Million Users” The Journal of Politics (forthcoming), with Neil Malhotra, Jaime Settle, Magdalena Wojcieszak, et al.

6. “How Does a Pandemic Affect Support for Democratic Norms? The Case of COVID-19.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (forthcoming), with Dietlind Stolle and Elisabeth Gidengil.

5. “Untrustworthy Sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated Exposure but No Attitudinal Effects.” Science Advances (2026), with Brendan Nyhan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Magdalena Wojcieszak, et al.

4. “Communicating with Voters to Build Trust in the U.S. Election System.” Journal of Election Administration, Research & Practice (2025), with Katherine Clayton, Thad Kousser, Brendan Nyhan, and Lauren Prather.

3. “Expert Bias and Democratic Erosion: Assessing Expert Perceptions of Contemporary American Democracy”, PS: Political Science and Politics (2024), with John Carey, Gretchen Helmke and Eli Rau.

2. “COVID-19 and Support for Executive Aggrandizement” Canadian Journal of Political Science (2022), with Elisabeth Gidengil and Dietlind Stolle.

1. “The partisan nature of support for democratic backsliding: A comparative perspective” European Journal of Political Research (2022), with Elisabeth Gidengil and Dietlind Stolle.

Work in progress

1. “The Political Consequences of the Carceral State: Evidence from Drunk-Driving Arrests in Ohio.”

2. “Does Social Media Increase Polarization? A Re-assessment of the 2020 Facebook-Instagram Election Study Using Multiverse Analysis.” With Neil Malhotra (and many others).

3. “The Evolution of Elite Political Preferences: Longitudinal Evidence from the Technology Industry.” With Christian Caballero, Pia Deshpande, Greg Ferenstein, Amir Golderb, John Konicki, and Neil Malhotra

4. “Feedback Eliminates the Perverse Effects of Interventions Against Misinformation.” With Brendan Nyhan, Kathleen Dowling, and Cameron Hickey.

5. “Do University Actions Affect Attitudes about Higher Education? Evidence from Experiments on Affordability, Politicization, and Scientific Innovation.” With Brandice Canes-Wrone, Jake Jares, Neil Malhotra, and Douglas Rivers.

6. Measuring Social Sorting and Its Association with Affective Polarization.

7. “Do Americans Know What They Don’t Know?”, with Philippe Chassé (Université de Montréal).

8. “Promoting Sources With Diverse Partisan Audiences Enhances News Feed Quality Without Reducing Engagement.” With Saumya Bhadani, Jack Andolina, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, Brendan Nyhan, and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia.

Other work