Joan C. Timoneda

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Science,

Purdue University

Welcome to my website! I am Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. I received my PhD from the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2019, specializing in comparative politics and data science. I was also a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. You can reach me at timoneda[at]purdue[dot]edu.

My substantive research centers on authoritarian regimes and democratic backsliding. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of personalism in dictatorship and democracy in the digital age. My methods work applies big data methods and novel natural language processing algorithms to key substantive questions in comparative politics, such as the evolution of Rafael Trujillo's personalist rule in the Dominican Republic or how democratically elected leaders subvert democracy using social media. You'll find more information on my research below.

Interests

Authoritarian regimes
Democratic backsliding
Quantitative methods
Data science

Education

PhD in Political Science, 2019

UMD College Park
MPhil in Latin American Studies, 2011

Oxford University, St Antony's College

Skills

R

Python

Stata

Publications

Joan C. Timoneda and Sebastián Vallejo Vera (Conditionally Accepted). BERT, RoBERTa or DeBERTa? Comparing Performance Across Transformer Models in Political Science Text. Journal of Politics.

Joan C. Timoneda, Abel Escribà-Folch, and John Chin (2023). The Rush To Personalize: Power Concentration After Failed Coups in Dictatorships. British Journal of Political Science.

Joan C. Timoneda (2023). Et Tu, Brute? Wealth Inequality and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Replacement. Studies in Comparative International Development.

Joan C. Timoneda and Erik Wibbels (2022). Spikes and Variance: Using Google Trends to Detect and Forecast Protest. Political Analysis.

Joan C. Timoneda and Sebastián Vallejo Vera (2021). Will I die of coronavirus? Google Trends data reveal that politics determine virus fears. PLOS ONE.

Joan C. Timoneda (2021). Wealth Wars: How Productivity Gaps Explain Democratic Erosion in Advanced Democracies. European Political Science Review.

Joan C. Timoneda (2021). Estimating group fixed effects in panel data with a binary dependent variable: How the LPM outperforms logistic regression in rare events data. Social Science Research.

Joan C. Timoneda and Sebastián Vallejo Vera (2021). How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from ecuador. Journal of Legislative Studies.

Joan C. Timoneda (2020). Institutions as Signals: How Dictators Consolidate Power in Times of Crisis. Comparative Politics.

Joan C. Timoneda (2019). Where In The World Is My Tweet: Detecting Irregular Removal Patterns On Twitter. PLOS ONE 13(9): e0203104..

Abel Escribà-Folch and Joan C. Timoneda (Forthcoming). Personalism in Dictatorships: Disentangling the Process of Power Accumulation Over Time. In Research Handbook on Authoritarianism, edited by Natasha Lindstaedt and Jeroen Van den Bosch. Wiley.

Ernesto Calvo, Joan C. Timoneda and Tiago Ventura (2020). Big Relational Data: Network-Analytic Measurement, in The Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations. SAGE.

Current Projects

Diana Dávila, Joan C. Timoneda and Sebastian Vallejo. Using Transformers to Identify Overt and Covert Racism in Spanish. Revise and resubmit.

Abel Escribà-Folch and Joan C. Timoneda. Does social media promote democratic backsliding? Under Review.

Joan C. Timoneda, Abel Escribà-Folch and Kyle Haynes. Trajectories of Personalism in Dictatorship. Under Review.

Joan C. Timoneda. Economic Shocks and Power Concentration in Dictatorship. Under Review.

Joan C. Timoneda, Christina Walker and Kayla Young. Is More Time Always Better? Revisiting the No Time-Varying Confounder Assumption for Unit Fixed Effects Models. Under Review.

Rafael Mestre and Joan C. Timoneda. How biased are you, GPT-3? Assessing Question and Answer Bias in GPT-3. In Progress.

Joan C. Timoneda and Josef Woldense. Whom to Appoint? Analyzing Cabinet Formation and Change in Dictatorship. In Progress.

Joan C. Timoneda and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. Random and Selective Masking in RoBERTa Models: How to Maximize Performance During Training. In Progress.

Teaching

At Purdue, I teach the following courses:

POL 501: Introduction to Political Methodology
POL 491: The Rise and Fall of Dictators
POL 141: Governments of the World (Intro to CP)
SCLA 102: Democracy, Citizenship and Civic Duty