Ines Levin

Biography

Ines Levin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. A scholar in the fields of political methodology and electoral behavior, Levin focuses on developing and applying computational and statistical methods to study voting behavior, election administration, and political participation across democracies. Her research examines topics including e-voting systems, election fraud detection using machine learning, voter participation patterns, and the effects of electoral reforms such as lowering the voting age.

Levin has published extensively in journals such as the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, and Political Behavior. Her methodological work includes developing machine learning approaches for election forensics, tree-based methods for analyzing spatial and temporal data, and techniques for causal inference with complex survey designs. She has collaborated on research examining voting technology adoption in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, and has studied political participation and civic engagement in both established and emerging democracies.

Levin received her Ph.D. in Social Science from the California Institute of Technology in 2012. She held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute from 2011 to 2012 and served as Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia from 2012 to 2016 before joining UC Irvine. She serves as Methods Field Coordinator in her department and is a member of the Center for the Study of Democracy Executive Committee. Levin teaches graduate courses in statistics and machine learning, and has taught summer courses at the Essex Summer School and Universidad Católica del Uruguay.

Education

• PhD in Social Science, California Institute of Technology, 2012
• MS in Social Science, California Institute of Technology, 2008
• Licenciada in Economics, Universidad ORT Uruguay, 2004

Distinctions

• Winner, Special Competition for Young Investigators, NSF-funded Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), 2014
• Institute Fellowship, California Institute of Technology, 2006-2011
• Max Weber Fellowship, European University Institute, 2011-2012
• Best paper award, EVOTE2014 conference, 2014
• Susette M. Talarico Award for Excellence in Teaching, Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, 2015
• UCI Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) Summer Seed Grant, 2021
• Dependent Care Travel Award, UC Irvine, 2025
• Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries (CORCL) Research & Travel award, UC Irvine, 2018, 2023, 2025