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.

I am also a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative.

Research

My research asks a deceptively simple question: how does technology change the way we govern ourselves — and whether the result strengthens or weakens democratic institutions? I pursue this question across three interconnected areas.

The first is AI and democratic governance. I study how governments, bureaucracies, and political institutions adopt and respond to artificial intelligence, and what the spread of AI means for the future of democracy and authoritarian control. This work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy, the American Political Science Review, and Public Administration Review.

The second is historical political economy. My book in progress, Inventing the Leviathan: How Technology Created the Administrative State, argues that technological disruptions have historically forced states to expand — producing a ratchet effect in which crises begat bureaucracy, and bureaucracy outlasted the crises that created it.

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

I also write for general audiences on technology, democracy, and governance. My essays have appeared in the Journal of Democracy, and I speak regularly at public forums including 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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