About Jason

Welcome!; Καλώς ήρθες!; добро пожаловать!; 欢迎!

I'm an Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy and Statistics (by courtesy) at the University of Georgia, a faculty fellow at the UGA Center for International Trade and Security (CITS), and a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Research

My research asks a simple question with complicated answers: how does technology change how we govern ourselves?

Since the dawn of industrialization, every major technological revolution has lead to an incremental expansion of the administrative state, a phenomenon that I call the “technology-state ratchet”. Understanding how this phenomenon works and what its effects are motivates my research across three domains.

The first is the historical political economy of the state. My book in progress, Inventing the Leviathan: How Technology Created the Administrative State, argues that the disruptive consequences of technological revolutions have forced states to expand their administrative and bureaucratic capacity, producing a ratchet effect in which each crisis builds bureaucratic machinery that outlasts the crisis itself.

The second is AI and democratic governance. My work on AI studies how political institutions adopt and respond to artificial intelligence, and what its spread means for the balance between democratic control and authoritarian power.

The third is computational and causal inference methods, the tools that help us measure institutional change. I develop and apply machine learning and causal inference methods for social science research, work collected in a forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume, Causal Inference and Counterfactuals with Machine Learning.

Beyond my scholarly work, I write and speak for general audiences on technology, democracy, and governance, including talks at public forums such as the National Endowment for Democracy.

Service

I serve as Associate Editor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at Public Administration Review, the flagship journal of the field.

TEACHING

I teach courses on the politics of technology, research methods, and machine learning for social scientists. I believe that quantitative methods are most powerful when taught alongside the substantive and ethical questions they're meant to help answer.

BACKGROUND

Before joining UGA, I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Prior to my doctorate, I received an A.M. in Statistics from Harvard University and worked as a researcher at Harvard Law School, where I studied labor unions and collective bargaining. I am a recipient of the Society for Political Methodology's Miller Prize for best paper in Political Analysis.

CONTACT

I'm always happy to hear from journalists, researchers, and prospective students. Feel free to reach out at ljanastas@uga.edu.

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