José J. Alcocer

I am an Applied Research Statistician at Harvard Law School. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC), where I was also a Graduate Research Associate in both the Democracy and Fair Elections Lab and the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. Prior to joining Harvard, I was a Survey Statistician at USC's Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC), a U.S. Census Bureau research branch.

Substantively, my research asks how formal institutions and informal power structures jointly determine who has political voice, and at what cost. My work spans four connected areas: race, identity, and legislative power within U.S. institutions; electoral systems and partisan governance, including redistricting and primary reform; police reform and government accountability, with a focus on state-citizen interactions; and racialized representation and governance in Latin American contexts. Across these areas, I draw on tools from causal inference, computational social science, and measurement theory. Some of my solo and collaborative work has been published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (JREP) and the Journal of Experimental Political Science (JEPS), with forthcoming work at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026). You can find more on these and other ongoing projects on the Research page.

I am also the creator of TextViz Studio, a no-code platform for social scientists that makes advanced text analysis and statistical modeling more accessible, intuitive, and interactive.

I serve as a Research Analyst at the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI), housed within Stanford Graduate School of Business's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. In partnership with the Latino Business Action Network (LBAN), SLEI produces the annual State of Latino Entrepreneurship (SOLE) report, advancing research and education aimed at accelerating the growth of Latino-owned businesses across the United States.

I also contribute to the Everyday Respect Project at USC in a dual capacity, as a researcher and as Data Architect. The project is a multidisciplinary collaboration studying officer-driver communication during LAPD traffic stops using community-informed AI tools, with findings presented to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners and published in academic journals. In my research role, I serve as an ontological and methodological bridge between social scientists and computer scientists, aligning conceptual definitions, units of analysis, and data structures for causal social science research. As Data Architect, I lead the design and implementation of the core database infrastructure that houses the project's data.

I hold a B.A. in Political Science from California State University, Long Beach, and a Master of Public Policy (M.P.P.) from USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy, where I focused on Applied Econometrics.

Outside of academia, I enjoy studying languages, traveling, and amateur photography, some of which you can see in the Photography section.