Emerging Researcher

Graeme Blair is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University with Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University. Graeme studies comparative politics with a focus on West Africa as well as experimental methodology. He has conducted survey research in Afghanistan, Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and developed new experimental methods for sensitive survey questions. Graeme is a principal investigator of the DeclareDesign project, which is developing tools to enable researchers to learn about the properties of research designs before implementing them. His work appears in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Political Analysis, and won the 2013 Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper at the Midwest Political Science Association. Graeme’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the International Growth Centre, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Dr. Graeme Blair led the development of DeclareDesign, a suite of free research design evaluation software and co-authored a research project to demonstrate the need and purpose of the software. These tools build on and facilitate the use of registration and pre-analysis plans to promote transparency by providing a mechanism for evaluating the potential effectiveness of a proposed study, as well as making it easier for applied researchers to be transparent in their designs, even with limited knowledge of best practices. Dr. Blair widely uses open science practices in his own research, posting data on Dataverse and, when possible, the R statistical environment.