Bastián González-Bustamante

Bastián González-Bustamante

Post-doctoral Researcher

Leiden University

Based in the Netherlands, I hold dual appointments as an Associate Professor of Public Administration at Universidad Diego Portales and as a post-doctoral researcher in Computational Social Science at Leiden University. I am also a Research Leader at the Oxford Computational Political Science Group. I hold a DPhil (PhD) in Politics from the University of Oxford and previously earned an MA in Political Science and a BA in Public Administration and Government from the Universidad de Chile.

My work bridges the fields of comparative politics, government and computational social science. I build large-scale text-as-data pipelines, deploy AI and machine learning models, and apply causal inference strategies. My recent peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Social Science Computer Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, World Development, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Government and Opposition, among others. I regularly present at IPSA, ECPR, EPSA, and COMPTEXT. At ECPR, I serve on the Steering Committee of the Standing Group on Political Methodology.

I am currently working on the Terrorist Group Adaptation & Lessons for Counterterrorism (TERGAP) project, funded by the European Union, to build a new dataset of counterterrorism events, which will help researchers identify patterns of adaptation, examine unintended effects of counterterrorism, and generate evidence to improve global security. In parallel, I contribute to COST Action CA22150 on executive-bureaucratic careers and lead the Enlace-Inserción UDP 2025-2026 project “Unpacking the Unpredictable: Using NLP and LLMs to Examine Cabinet Politics and Responses to Stochastic Events in Presidential Democracies.”

Interests
  • Comparative politics
  • Ministerial turnover
  • Elites and civil service
  • Machine learning
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Quantitative methods
Education
  • DPhil (PhD) in Politics, 2019-2023

    University of Oxford

  • MA in Political Science, 2010-2013

    Universidad de Chile

  • BA in Government, 2004-2009

    Universidad de Chile

Featured Publications

Peer-reviewed

(2026). Uncovering the Rule of Law in European Countries. Law & Social Inquiry. FirstView.

DOI Preprint Code

(2026). Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature, 652, 135-142.

DOI Preprint

(2026). Blame Shifting in Presidential Systems: Ministerial Terminations’ Corrective Effect on Approval. Public Opinion Quarterly, (90)1, 96–117.

DOI Preprint Dataset

(2025). Changing meaning of the rule of law. Artificial Intelligence and Law. OnlineFirst.

DOI Preprint Code

Preprints

Working papers

(2025). Emulating Public Opinion: A Proof-of-Concept of AI-Generated Synthetic Survey Responses for the Chilean Case. Empiria Lab Method Series, 1.

DOI Preprint

(2025). Charting Reproducibility and Performance: LLMs in Multilingual Toxic Speech Detection. Paper presented at the LLM Pre-Conference Workshop, European Political Science Association (EPSA), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, June 25.

Preprint

(2024). Benchmarking LLMs in Political Content Text-Annotation: Proof-of-Concept with Toxicity and Incivility Data. Paper presented at the 8th Monash-Warwick-Zurich Text-as-Data Workshop, September 16-17.

Preprint

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