Sebastián Vallejo Vera

Assistant Professor

Sebastian Head Shot

PhD, University of Maryland, College Park
Telephone: 519.661.2111 ext. 85163
E-mail: sebastian.vallejo@uwo.ca
Office: Social Science Centre 7221
Website: www.svallejovera.com

Research Interests

My research explores the relationship between gendered political institutions and representation, and racial identity and racism in Latin America. I am particularly interested in the gendered barriers in political institutions, and the strategic reaction of political actors when encountering these barriers. My methodological work applies novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) to a wide variety of text data, from legislative speeches to tweets, to answer substantive questions about gender, racism, and politics.

You can find a complete and updated list of my publications, working papers, and research projects at my website.

Selected Publications

Peer Reviewed Publications

  • Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “Rage in the Machine: Activation of Racist Content in Social Media.” Latin American Politics and Society (2023): 65(1), 74-100. doi:10.1017/lap.2022.25.
  • Alemán, Eduardo, Juan Pablo Micozzi, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Congressional Committees, Electoral Connections, and Legislative Speech.” Political Research Quarterly (2022): 10659129221119200.
  •  Abad, Angelica, Raul Aldaz Pena, Diana Davila Gordillo, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “An Unwelcomed Deja-vu: Ecuadorian Politics in 2021.” Revista de Ciencia Política 42, no. 2 (2022): 281-308.
  • Vallejo Vera, Sebastián, and Analía Gómez Vidal. “The politics of interruptions: Gendered disruptions of legislative speeches.” The Journal of Politics 84, no. 3 (2022): 1384-1402.
  • Currin, Christopher Brian, Sebastián Vallejo Vera, and Ali Khaledi-Nasab. “Depolarization of echo chambers by random dynamical nudge.” Scientific Reports 12, no. 1 (2022): 1-13.
  • Abad Cisneros, Angélica, Raúl Aldaz Peña, Diana Dávila Gordillo, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Believe in me: parties’ strategies during a pandemic, evidence from Ecuador.” Journal of Politics in Latin America 13, no. 3 (2021): 419-441.
  • Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Will I die of coronavirus? Google Trends data reveal that politics determine virus fears.” Plos one 16, no. 10 (2021): e0258189.
  • Calvo, Ernesto, Paula Clerici, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Ciencia y política en tiempos del covid-19.” Política y gobierno 28, no. 2 (2021).
  • Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “How do shocks realign interest group lobbying in congress? Evidence from Ecuador.” The Journal of Legislative Studies (2021): 1-39.
  • Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “By invitation only: On Why Do politicians bring interest groups into committees.” The Journal of Legislative Studies (2021): 1-38.
  • McDermott, Monika L., Douglas Schwartz, and Sebastian Vallejo Vera. “Talking the talk but not walking the walk: Public reactions to hypocrisy in political scandal.” American Politics Research 43, no. 6 (2015): 952-974.

Working Papers

  • Timoneda, Joan C., and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Pay (Self-)Attention: How Transformer Models Increase Performance in Text Classification Tasks.” R&R: Journal of Politics.
  • Hellmueller, Lea, Lindita Camaj, Peggy Lindner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “US Primary Debates in Bilingual Online Spaces: The Impact of Journalistic Cultures on Social Media Discourse.” R&R: Digital Journalism
  • Hellmueller, Lea, Lindita Camaj, Peggy Lindner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “The Democratic Value of Uncivil Talk and Strategic Game Reporting: A Computational Analysis of Facebook Conversations During the 2020 U.S. Primary Debates.” R&R: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
  • Dávila Gordillo, Diana, Joan C. Timoneda, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Machines Do See Color: How Transformers Outperform Other Approaches in Classifying Overt and Covert Racism in Text.” R&R: Journal of Politics
  • Alemán, Eduardo, Tiffany Barnes, Juan Pablo Micozzi, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “The Role of Gender in Speech Participation: Evidence from Chile.”
  • Alemán, Eduardo, Pablo Valdivieso Kastner, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera. “Electoral Reform and Legislative Incentives: Constituency Representation in Ecuador.”
  • Vallejo Vera, Sebastián. “Performance of Maximum Likelihood Fixed Effects Estimation in Panel Data with Sample Selection Bias.” Under Review

Book Chapters

  • Vidal, Analía Gómez, and Sebastián Vallejo Vera, ‘Ecuador: Individual Incentives and the Gendered Path to Power’, in Hanna Back, Marc Debus, and Jorge M. Fernandes (eds), The Politics of Legislative Debates (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Nov. 2021). 

Books