About

Georgia Kernell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at UCLA, serving as a courtesy faculty member in the UCLA Political Science Department. Her research examines political parties and elections, political communication, comparative political behavior, partisanship, economic voting, and formal and quantitative methodology. She studies both comparative and American politics. Kernell is currently writing a book about how political parties’ organizations shape candidate strategies, representation, and electoral success in long-standing parliamentary democracies. She has published her work in various outlets including Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Analysis, and Political Communication. Professor Kernell teaches courses on political communication and research methods.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Economics
• Data Mining
• Mathematics
• Demographic economics
• Econometrics
• Engineering
• Public administration
• Positive economics
• Mechanical engineering
• Microeconomics
• Epistemology
• Data science
• Geography
• Medicine
• World Wide Web
• Psychology
• Virology
• Mathematical economics

Selected publications

• Political polarization as a co-adaptive process

  Journal of Communication · 2026-01-09

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Political polarization is often characterized as a consequence of changes in media content or technology. We argue, in contrast, for an account that views polarization in media and the public as a co-adaptive process. This paper begins with a brief review of cultural evolution and co-adaptation and then considers the application of similar ideas to changes in media and the public over time. Using formal models, we suggest that—in combination with the human tendency toward in-group bias—a co-adaptive (rather than unidirectional) relationship can best account for real-world dynamics. We consider the implications of these findings for our understanding of media effects and technological innovation in polarization, representative democracy, and mass-mediated communication more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• Inside Parties

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-02-25 · 16 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  While extensive research examines electoral systems and institutions at the country-level, few studies investigate rules within parties. Inside Parties changes the research landscape by systematically examining 65 parties in 20 parliamentary democracies around the world. Georgia Kernell develops a formal model of party membership and tests the hypotheses using cross-national surveys, member studies, experiments, and computer simulations of projected vote shares. She finds that a party's level of decentralization – the degree to which it incorporates rank and file members into decision making – determines which voters it best represents. Decentralized parties may attract more members to campaign for the party, but they do so at the cost of adopting more extreme positions that pull them away from moderate voters. Novel and comprehensive, Inside Parties is an indispensable study of how parties select candidates, nominate leaders, and set policy goals.

  PublisherDOI

• The AI Referee: How Online Interventions Shape Incivility and User Engagement in News Discussions

  Social Media + Society · 2025-08-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper seeks to understand how online interventions shape incivility and user engagement with news comments. Using a novel dataset of over 39 million news comments on Korea’s largest online news source (Naver News), we examine changes in the share of comments that are categorized as uncivil before and after the introduction of two automated interventions aimed at flagging incivility. We trained two deep learning models to categorize comments and replicate each intervention. The findings reveal significant decreases in uncivil content following each intervention. Interestingly, we find mixed effects of the interventions on total engagement: while the number of comments and commenters decreased after the first intervention, both metrics increased after the second. Examining individual-level data reveals that the aggregate reduction in incivility cuts across all users regardless of pre-intervention incivility or commenting frequency.

  PublisherDOI

• Social networks and voter turnout

  Royal Society Open Science · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics

  , 25-42 (doi:10.2307/1953324)) calculus of voting into the context of a social network. In the model, an individual's expressive benefits to voting depend on the behaviour of their social contacts. We show that there may be multiple equilibria and analyse how these equilibria depend on the structure of the network. We discuss six empirical implications of the model for turnout, some of which suggest novel answers to longstanding puzzles in the turnout literature, such as: why are higher income individuals more likely to vote even in cases when registration costs are low? Why is turnout so difficult to predict? Why does lowering registration costs disproportionately increase turnout among high-income voters? And why do we observe inertia in turnout across elections?

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Social networks and voter turnout"

  2023-09-25

  peer-review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mask images on Twitter increase during COVID-19 mandates, especially in Republican counties

  Scientific Reports · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Wearing masks reduces the spread of COVID-19, but compliance with mask mandates varies across individuals, time, and space. Accurate and continuous measures of mask wearing, as well as other health-related behaviors, are important for public health policies. This article presents a novel approach to estimate mask wearing using geotagged Twitter image data from March through September, 2020 in the United States. We validate our measure using public opinion survey data and extend the analysis to investigate county-level differences in mask wearing. We find a strong association between mask mandates and mask wearing-an average increase of 20%. Moreover, this association is greatest in Republican-leaning counties. The findings have important implications for understanding how governmental policies shape and monitor citizen responses to public health crises.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining the limits of the Condorcet Jury Theorem: Tradeoffs in hierarchical information aggregation systems

  Collective Intelligence · 2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Mathematical economics

  Condorcet’s Jury Theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter’s independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 1/2. Previous research has found that switching to a hierarchical system always leads to an inferior result. Yet, in many situations direct voting is infeasible (e.g., due to high implementation or infrastructure costs), and hierarchical voting may provide a reasonable alternative. This paper examines differences in accuracy rates of hierarchical and direct voting systems for varying group sizes, abstention rates, and voter competences. We derive three main results. First, we prove that indirect two-tier systems differ most from their direct counterparts when group size and number are equal (i.e., when each equals [Formula: see text], where N d is the total number of voters in the direct system). In multitier systems, we prove that this difference is maximized when group size equals [Formula: see text], where n is the number of hierarchical levels. Second, we show that while direct majority rule always outperforms indirect voting for homogeneous electorates, hierarchical voting gains in accuracy when either the number of groups or the number of individuals within each group increases. Third, we prove that when voter abstention and competency are correlated within groups, hierarchical systems can outperform direct voting. The results have implications beyond voting, including information processing in the brain, collective cognition in animal groups, and information aggregation in machine learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Mask Mandates Work, Especially in Republican Counties

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration
  PublisherDOI

• Tradeoffs in Hierarchical Voting Systems

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021-10-05

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Condorcet's jury theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter's independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 0.5. Yet, in situations where direct voting systems are infeasible, such as due to high implementation and infrastructure costs, hierarchical voting systems provide a reasonable alternative. We study differences in outcome precision between hierarchical and direct voting systems for varying group sizes, abstention rates, and voter competencies. Using asymptotic expansions of the derivative of the reliability function (or Banzhaf number), we first prove that indirect systems differ most from their direct counterparts when group size and number are equal to each other, and therefore to $\sqrt{N_{\rm d}}$, where $N_{\rm d}$ is the total number of voters in the direct system. In multitier systems, we prove that this difference is maximized when group size equals $\sqrt[n]{N_{\rm d}}$, where $n$ is the number of hierarchical levels. Second, we show that while direct majority rule always outperforms hierarchical voting for homogeneous electorates that vote with certainty, as group numbers and size increase, hierarchical majority voting gains in its ability to represent all eligible voters. Furthermore, when voter abstention and competency are correlated within groups, hierarchical systems often outperform direct voting, which we show by using a generating function approach that is able to analytically characterize heterogeneous voting systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A “Satisficing” Dynamical Model

  SIAM Review · 2020 · 19 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Positive economics

  Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a dynamical model that predicts ideological positions of political parties. Our approach tackles the challenge of incorporating bounded rationality into mathematical models and integrates the empirical finding of satisficing decision making---voters settle for candidates who are “good enough" when deciding for whom to vote. We test the model using data from the U.S. Congress over the past 150 years and find that our predictions are consistent with the two major political parties' historical trajectories. In particular, the model explains how polarization between the Democrats and Republicans since the 1960s could be a consequence of increasing ideological homogeneity within the parties.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eduardo L. Leoni

  Columbia University

  23 shared

• John D. Huber

  23 shared

• Lucas Böttcher

  4 shared

• Tim Groeling

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Xiaofeng Lin

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Jungseock Joo

  Nvidia (United States)

  2 shared

• Jun Luo

  Guangzhou Vocational College of Science and Technology

  2 shared

• ZACHARY STEINERT-THRELKELD

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared