ISPS Launches New Funding Program to Create High-Value Social Science Datasets

January 26, 2026

Points of light connecting glowing orbs intersperced with numbers

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies has announced a new funding initiative to create high-value datasets for social science research.

The new grants will build upon existing ISPS support for research that advances survey methodology, research exploring democratic innovations, as well as conferences addressing important social and public policy issues

The program will offer financial support to research efforts that generate new datasets, strengthen existing ones, or enrich them with added annotations, with the understanding that these resources will be shared broadly and become public assets for scholars at Yale and beyond. It will also fund projects focused exclusively on building or refining datasets that are expected to provide substantial benefits to a wide range of researchers.

“At ISPS, our mission has always centered on producing research and making it accessible to others,” said interim ISPS Director Gregory Huber, Forst Family Professor of Political Science. “We are incredibly fortunate to work alongside colleagues who are committed to discovery and to developing new ways of advancing knowledge across a wide range of important questions and disciplines.”

In addition, ISPS will accept proposals this semester seeking funding for studies advancing survey research methodology and its Democratic Innovations program. The deadline for submitting proposals for the spring cycle is March 30, 2026.

Last year, ISPS funded five projects through Democratic Innovations, a program that identifies and tests new ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance:

  • The Politics of Militant Democracy (Isabela Mares, Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science)
  • Sharing the Vote: Instrumental or Principled Support for Inclusion? (Klaudia Wegschaider, ISPS external postdoctoral associate)
  • Archival Research on Compulsory Voting (Eli Rau, ISPS postdoctoral associate)
  • Shared Values or Collective Efficacy? Mechanisms of Depolarization Through National Identity (Alberto Stefanelli, lecturer in statistics & data science and political science)
  • The Electoral Effect of Prison Closures (Nicholas Ottone and Amanda Weiss, Ph.D. candidates in political science)

ISPS also provided funding for 13 new projects that advance survey methodology or pursue novel social science research questions through survey data:

  • The Legacy of Corporate Culture: How Multinational Exposure Reshapes Local Identity (Diana Van Patten, assistant professor of economics)
  • Measuring Cross-Cultural Mental State Inference Using Survey Methods and Implications for Policy Support (Maria Gendron, assistant professor of psychology)
  • Public Attitudes Towards Debts and Deficits: The Role of Information, Elite Cues, and Policy Attributes (Patrick Sullivan, ISPS/APEX postdoctoral associate)
  • Testing AI Interventions for Civil Deliberation with Survey-Embedded Chatbots (Daniel Karell, assistant professor of sociology)
  • Rationalizing Democracy Through Projection: How Voters Justify Undemocratic Actions of Their Co-Partisan Politicians (Nayun Kim Ph.D. candidate in political science)
  • The Suitability of Repeated Measures Designed by Content and Respondent Type (Itamar Yakir, ISPS postdoctoral associate)
  • Grievances, Loss, and Nostalgia: Are White Men Rebelling Against Democracy? (Alberto Stefanelli, lecturer in statistics & data science and political science)
  • Surveying Political Identification, Information, and Engagement among Low Wage Workers (Daniel HoSang, professor of American studies)
  • Investigating User Understanding of Differential Privacy via Factorial Survey Design (Quanquan Liu, assistant professor of computer science)
  • Comparing Conventional and LLM-Generated Materials in Factorial Survey Experiments (Luke Sanford, assistant professor of environmental policy and governance; assistant professor of political science)
  • Digitizing Factory Survey Data in 19th-Century Japan (Cheryl Wu, Ph.D. candidate in economics)
  • Measuring the Moral Worth of Occupations with Human and LLM Data (Alex Yan, Ph.D. candidate in sociology)
  • Mapping Neighborhood Disadvantage with AI: Toward a Next-Generation Index to Advance Health Equity (Emma Zang, associate professor of sociology; assistant professor of biostatistics; assistant professor of global affairs)

Finally, the latest funding for conferences:

  • Innovating Democracy in the Era of Technological Transformation: Past, Present, and Future (Seulki Lee-Geiller, ISPS associate research scientist)
  • Platform Governance: The Challenges of Building Healthy Online Ecosystems (Caroline Nobo, research scholar in law and executive director of the Justice Collaboratory)
  • The 100-Year Life: The Law, Policy and Politics of Longevity and Aging in America (Abbe Gluck, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law; faculty director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy; professor of internal medicine)
  • Integrated Assessment: Connecting Natural and Social Science to Answer Policy Questions (Eli Fenichel, Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics)
  • U.S. Policies on End of Life (Xi Chen, associate professor of public health)
  • Mapping the Future of Development Economics in the Wake of Rising U.S. Protectionism (Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics; director of the Economic Growth Center)
  • How Care Provision Influences Women’s Choices and Child Development (Costas Meghir, Douglas A. Warner III Professor of Economics)
  • Environmental Joy 2025 (Michael Gelobter, executive director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice)
  • Gametic Politics: Eggs, Sperm, and Gender/Sex in the 21st Century (Rene Almeling, Professor of sociology; professor of American studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; public health; and medicine)
  • In(visibility): The Creation of Narratives and Their Legacies/ 5th Annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility at Yale (Kenya Loudd, Ph.D. candidate in the history of science and medicine and African American studies)
  • The 2026 Yale Forum on Climate Change and Health: Bridging Evidence and Policy at the Crossroads (Alix Rachman, climate health program administrator at the Yale School of Public Health)
  • Rebuilding Trust in Public Health: Causes, Consequences, and Responses (Jason Schwartz, associate professor of public health and in the history of medicine)
  • Marketing-Industrial Organization (MIO) Conference (Kevin Williams, professor of economics)
  • Inaugural Yale Cooling Conference and Workshop (Lea Winter, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering)
  • Misperceptions in Political Science Research: Latest Developments and Remaining Questions (Itamar Yakir, ISPS postdoctoral associate)
  • Life Course, Institutions, and Inequality in Cognitive Aging: Toward Policy-Relevant Insights (Emma Zang, associate Professor of sociology and biostatistics and global affairs)