Christy Coulson
Christy is a graduate research affiliate with the IRDS and an ESRC-funded second-year PhD candidate in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previously, Christy occupied research assistantship roles at the University of Oxford’s DPIR and LSE’s Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC). Christy holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Exeter (2016), an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Governance from the University of Amsterdam (2017) and an MSc in Applied Social Data Science from LSE (2023).
Christy is a social data and political scientist. His research focuses on the application of non-parametric machine learning methods to inference and explanation tasks in political science. He is specifically interested in the tension between explanation, inference, and prediction in the context of ML strategies and seeks to understand how we can leverage the predictive fidelity of advanced ML while maintaining the explanatory and inferential qualities of traditional parametric methods. He is also interested in applying these methods in quasi-experimental settings. Substantively, Christy’s research currently focuses on predicting and explaining conflict, understanding protest dynamics, armed group strategy, and political communication.
In addition to academia, Christy has spent several years in the data science and advanced analytics practices across a variety of industries, from capital markets to intellectual property.
Working Papers
Coulson, C., “Using Shapley Values to Generate Theories in Political Science.”, 2025.
Schubiger, L., Myers, E., de Marchi, S., Dorsey, S., Coulson, C. “Mobilization for Equality: Norm Change and Backlash.” Working paper, 2025.