Noah Dasanaike

Hi, I'm Noah. I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate and the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where I also received my MA (2024) and BA (2022). In the summers of 2025 and 2026, I was a Quantitative Research Intern at Two Sigma, where I continue to work part-time during the academic year.

I am on the 2026–27 academic job market. I expect to complete my PhD in May 2027; my committee is co-chaired by Ryan Enos and Gary King, with Grzegorz Ekiert and Torben Iversen.

My research studies the political economy of cleavages: which social differences become political divisions, why in some places and not others, and why they persist or how they change. I also work on computational methods for large-scale data collection, including the use of language models for historical document digitization, record linkage, and ethnicity inference.

I am the creator of the Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) Dataset, a database of geocoded, small-area (usually polling-station level) election results for 131 countries. You can read more, download the data, and explore it on the map here.

You can access EnsembleLink, my state-of-the-art method for zero-shot record linkage, here.

At Harvard, I have twice taught the Ph.D.-level "Math Prefresher" and GOV 2020: The Hidden Curriculum (for Gary King). I have also taught STAT 186: Causal Inference (for Susan Murphy) and GOV 97: Political Geography (instructor of record), as well as a GIS workshop for PhD students. Separately, I have also done redistricting consulting.

You can contact me by email at noahdasanaike@g.harvard.edu.

Posts

• How I Digitized 3.4 Million Nazi Party Membership Cards
• What I've Learned From Digitizing 20 Million Historical Documents
• socOCRbench: An OCR Benchmark for Social Science Documents
• namesbench

Research

Job Market Paper

• Why Ethnic Difference Rarely Divides the Vote [abstract]
  Why does politics organize on class in some places and ethnicity in others? I argue that ethnicity divides the vote only where it decides who sets the terms that a household deals on: its merchant, employer, or landlord. Where those people are of another ethnic group, a complaint about their terms is a complaint about them, and no class appeal can be made without making an ethnic one. Where these terms-setters are the group's own and deal with them alone, they want the group kept a group, and political conflict turns constitutional. Unless one of these conditions is met by a minority comprising enough of the electorate, the party system organizes on class. I test this on nearly two billion individual records of ethnicity, occupation and residence in twenty countries across two centuries. Only two produce an ethnic cleavage.

Publications

• Dasanaike, Noah. (2026). The Small-Area Global Elections (SAGE) Dataset. Nature Scientific Data. [article], [dataset & downloads], [code]

Working Papers

Substantive

• Absorbers, Concentrators, and the Urban-Rural Divide revise and resubmit
• Urban-Rural Political Divides Are the Exception, Not the Rule revise and resubmit
• People and Places in the Transmission of Culture: Evidence from German America revise and resubmit
• The Structure of Technological Revolutions: What the Last Structural Transformation Tells Us About the Next One (with Torben Iversen)
• Persistence Without Program: Family Transmission Among Nazi-Émigré Descendants

Methodological

• Probabilistic Race and Ethnicity Prediction Using Group-Specific Name Lists (with Kosuke Imai and Kyla Chasalow)
• Using Embedding Models to Improve Probabilistic Race Prediction (with Kosuke Imai) [working paper]
• Zero-Shot Digitization of Historical Documents with Vision Language Models [working paper]
• Pre-Trained Language Models as Zero-Shot Tools for Social Science Research [working paper] [EnsembleLink] revise and resubmit
• Going Glocal: A Macro-Micro Approach to Political Science (with John Gerring)

Software

• Khanna, Kabir, Brandon Bertelsen, Santiago Olivella, Evan Rosenman, Kosuke Imai, and Noah Dasanaike. "Wru: Who Are You? Bayesian Prediction of Racial Category Using Surname, First Name, Middle Name, and Geolocation." R Package Version 3 (2026).

Additional Work

• Dasanaike, Noah and Grzegorz Ekiert. (2025). Autorytarne Preferencje Wyborców Jako Przyczyna Erozji Demokracji. Almanach 2025/2026, Concilium Civitas. [article pdf]
• Ekiert, Grzegorz and Noah Dasanaike. (2024). The Return of Dictatorship. Journal of Democracy. [article pdf], [publication page], [working paper], [interview]
• Dasanaike, Noah. (2021). Businessperson Deputies and Party Cohesion: Evidence from the Russian State Duma. Party Politics. [article pdf]