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Valentina Gonzalez-Rostani

Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Valentina Gonzalez-Rostani
Pronouns She / Her / Hers Email gonzalez.rostani@usc.edu

Research & Practice Areas

Political Economy & Political Methodology

Biography

Name: Valentina González-Rostani (González and Rostani are both my last names).

 

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Fellow of OpenAI’s Economic Research Exchange (2026–2027). My research sits at the intersection of political economy and political methodology. I examine how globalization, automation, and AI reshape work, inequality, collective action, political representation, and democratic politics across advanced economies and the Global South. I also develop computational and survey-based methods for studying politics in the age of AI.
 
 
Background, research interests, and public engagement.
 
My research examines how technological and economic change reshapes work and politics. A central focus is how businesses adopt AI, how unions and collective bargaining govern its use, and whether worker voice and protections keep pace with technological change. Reflecting this research agenda, I served on the APSA Task Force on AI and Political Science (2025–2026), contributing to its committee on economic inequality and the labor force. I study these questions using a range of data and methods, including a cross-national archive of more than 80,000 collective bargaining agreements, measures of business AI use and occupational exposure, and original surveys of workers and managers. Related work investigates how globalization, automation, and labor-market change affect unions, political representation, populism, inequality, and democratic conflict across Europe, North America, and Latin America.
 
Methodologically, I combine causal inference, survey and conjoint experiments, computational text analysis, and LLM-assisted measurement. I build reproducible pipelines for analyzing large collections of unstructured text and develop validated measures that connect technological and institutional change with labor-market and political outcomes. My methodological contributions include sentence-level measures of political narratives, tools for detecting AI-assisted survey responses, and frameworks for using agentic AI to support transparent measurement and validation in empirical social science.
 
My work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the Journal of Politics, Ecological Economics, Political Science Research and Methods, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. My scholarship has received several honors, including the Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award in Political Economy (2026). My research has received support from Schmidt Sciences’ AI at Work initiative, OpenAI’s Economic Research Exchange, the APSA Political Economy Section’s Rosenbluth Junior Scholar Award, and Princeton University’s Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, among others.
 
At USC, I teach courses on text-as-data, data analysis, and international political economy, and I serve as the faculty representative for methods on the PhD Steering Committee. I care deeply about teaching, mentorship, and building inclusive pathways into research. I am also affiliated with the Mobilization & Political Economy NSF-REU program, where I mentor students from underrepresented backgrounds as they prepare for graduate study and research careers.
I co-direct Razones y Personas, a long-running platform where social scientists publish public-facing work on politics and policy, with a particular focus on Latin America and Uruguay.
 
Before joining USC, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Prior to moving to the United States, I worked in Uruguayan politics as a grassroots organizer and advisor to a member of Congress. Earlier in my career, I worked at KPMG, where I gained an industry perspective that continues to inform my academic research.
 
Contact.You can reach me at gonzalez.rostani [at] usc.edu.
 
 

Education

  • Ph.D. Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 2024
  • M.A. Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 2021
  • M.S. Master in Public Policies (MPP), Universidad Catolica del Uruguay, 2019
  • B.A. Accounting, Universidad de la Republica, 2015
    • Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University, 2024-2025

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    I specialize in political economy, focusing on understanding how and to what extent economic polarization (a disappearing middle class) fuels political polarization (disappearing moderate parties, candidates, and voters). My research offers novel insights into the political economy of job automation, the primary driver of economic polarization, by examining the mechanisms that connect this phenomenon to individuals’ political attitudes and the interplay between economic, cultural, and institutional factors. Studying these phenomena effectively demands rigorous empirical methods. Thus, I am also working on developing new methodological tools, such as hierarchical models with spatial autocorrelation, and a computational method to measure populism.

    Research Specialties

    Political Economy & Political Methodology

  • Journal Article

    • González-Rostani, V., Togami, C., Lopez-Santana, M., Ramirez, T., Tormos-Aponte, F., Velez-Serrano, M. (2025). Engaging Diversity: An Inclusive Approach to Undergraduate Mentorship in Mobilization and Political Economy. PS: Political Science & Politics.
    • González-Rostani, V. (2025). Elections, Right-wing Populism, and Political-Economic Polarization: The Role of Institutions and Political Outsiders. The Journal of Politics. First View
    • Chavarría-Mora, E., Chen, C., González-Rostani, V., Morgenstern, S. (2024). How Germane are Moral and Economic Policies to Ideology? Evidence from Latin American Legislators. Legislative Legislative Studies Quarterly. First View
    • González-Rostani, V., Incio, J., Lezama, G. (2024). Social Media versus Surveys: A New Scalable Approach to Understanding Political Discourse. Legislative Legislative Studies Quarterly. First View
    • González-Rostani, V. (2024). Engaged Robots, and Disengaged Workers: Automation and Political Apathy. Economics & Politics. First View
    • González-Rostani, V., Morgenstern, S. (2023). Legislators’ Religiosity and Same-Sex Marriage in Latin America. First View
    • Todo robot es político! (Every robot is political!), June 16, 2022. Published at Razones y Personas (with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License)

      , 2022-2023

    • La noche de la nostalgia (The night of nostalgia), October 12, 2023. Published at Razones y Personas (with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License)., 2023-2024
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