Research Interests
I’m an institutionalist at heart and most of the substance of my work explores how we create rules and meaning for ourselves. Methodologically, I am a computational social scientist interested in contributing to methodological approaches, such as text analysis and agent-based modeling. See my CV here, or read my full research statement (PDF).
Ongoing projects
I have four main projects in process right now – all generally computational in nature, mostly focused upon how we make meaning. The third project, on ABMs, is a methodological project exploring how to maximize outcomes.
Political Candidate Playlists
In this project, I analyze songs used by US political candidates in their campaigns in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections. I find both cross-party and within-party patterns, including statistically significant and visually distinct partisan asymmetries along temporal and emotional axes in PCA space. Republican candidates favor songs focused on the past and rich in trust and joy and non-Trump Republicans draw more on country music, while Democratic playlists are more varied. Across his three bids, Donald Trump’s playlists move steadily toward a “golden era” register: joyful, trusting, and religious lyrics with increasingly male references.
Music lyrics
This is a multifaceted project looking at new methodological approaches to text analysis. In the initial project, we explore one artist’s cannon and analyze distinctions between rhetoric-focused and emotion-focused language, mapping a landscape across the career of Taylor Swift. This article is out at Psychology of Creativity, Aesthetics, and the Arts.
PCA of Taylor Swift’s Catalogue
In it, we track the development of Swift as an artist, finding that her work incorporates a juxtaposition of contrasting emotions in what we term ‘Swiftian Saudade.’ Her work evolves from a more positive and lyrically focused space to one full of darker emotions.
If you’re looking for my thoughts on the newest Taylor Swift album, look no further!
Our follow-up project expands beyond one artist to look more generally at pop music.
Place-making
This project explores how fandom creates self-reinforcing structures. I scrape fandom subreddits, analyzing the content of discussions and how fans create expansive third places.
ABM
This project is a collaboration on ABM design from a perspective of better means to evaluate the model’s success. We use machine learning to predict effective parameter combinations for more productive sweeps.
Publications
- Clipperton, Jean, and Loizos Bitsikokos. 2025. “You Do Not Get to Tell Me about Sad: Swiftian Saudade in Taylor Swift’s Lyrics.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. doi:10.1037/aca0000810. preprint/online first pdf available here
- Alter, K., Clipperton, J., Schraudenbach, E., & Rozier, L. (2020). Gender and Status in American Political Science: Who Determines Whether a Scholar Is Noteworthy? Perspectives on Politics, 18(4), 1048-1067. doi:10.1017/S1537592719004985
Talks
- Clipperton, Jean. 2026. “Cultivated Curiosity” University of Chicago Laboratory School, University of Chicago, Fall 2025
- Clipperton, Jean. 2026. “Meaning through Music” MACSS Computational Social Science Workshop, University of Chicago, Fall 2026
- Clipperton, Jean. 2025. “It’s a new soundtrack: political candidates, campaigns, and playlists” MACSS Computational Social Science Workshop, University of Chicago, Fall 2025
- Simpson College, “cultivated curiosity and the liberal arts education” Fall 2025
Non Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Clipperton, et al. Empirical Methods in Political Science: An Introduction Summer 2019 https://nulib-oer.github.io/empirical-methods-polisci/
- Alternative Final Assignment Format Tips and Tools, guest blog post with NU Digital Learning Fall 2020 https://canvaspost.northwestern.edu/2020/12/07/alternative-final-assignment-format-tips-and-tools/
- Increasing Zoom Engagement, guest blog post with NU Digital Learning Fall 2020 https://canvaspost.northwestern.edu/2020/10/19/tips-for-zoom-engagement-in-the-virtual-classroom/
- Alternative Final Assignment Formats, guest blog post with NU Digital Learning Spring 2019 https://digitallearning.northwestern.edu/article/2019/04/23/alternative-final-assignment-formats
- Incorporating Student feedback, guest blog post with NU Digital Learning Winter 2019 https://digitallearning.northwestern.edu/article/2019/01/31/incorporating-student-feedback-your-course
- Improving your Course, guest blog post with NU Digital Learning Fall 2018 https://digitallearning.northwestern.edu/article/2018/09/10/easy-things-you-can-do-improve-your-course-and-your-teaching
Working Papers
- Clipperton, Jean. 2025. “It’s a new soundtrack: political candidates, campaigns, and playlists”
- Clipperton, Jean, Josue Franco, Shane Nordyke, Melissa Shaffer O’Connell, Frederick Wood. 2020. “SOTL Research Design for Assessment of Interventions.” APSA Preprints. doi:10.33774/apsa-2020-gwfl0.