We are proud to share that Eunseong Oh, a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, has been awarded the 2025 John T. Williams Dissertation Prize by the Society for Political Methodology. This prestigious award recognizes the best dissertation proposal in the field of political methodology and honors the legacy of Professor John T. Williams and his commitment to graduate training and methodological innovation.

Oh’s winning proposal, titled “Bipartisan Cooperation,” impressed the selection committee with its creative and ambitious approach to measuring latent political behaviors using cutting-edge computational techniques. The project proposes a multi-modal machine and deep learning framework that draws on textual, audio-visual, and network features from administrative data to assess elusive constructs such as legislators’ deliberative cooperation and analytical capacity.

The committee noted that Oh’s methodological pipeline offers not only a rigorous and scalable way to examine the dynamics of bipartisan collaboration, but also a broadly applicable framework that could inform future research across political behavior, legislative studies, and computational social science.

The selection committee included prominent scholars in the field: Justin Esarey, Brenton Kenkel, Naijia Liu, Cyrus Samii, and Walter Mebane (Chair). In their citation, the committee emphasized that Oh’s work “offers an opportunity to assess what current deep learning methods can reveal about the latent variables that drive political dynamics.”

Eunseong Oh’s award is a testament to the strength of UCR’s political methodology training and to her own exceptional scholarship. Please join us in congratulating Eunseong on this remarkable achievement!