Rate My Professor Kenneth Benoit

Kenneth Benoit is Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of Computational Social Science at Singapore Management University, a position he has held since August 2024. He previously served as Director of the Data Science Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2020 to 2024, and as Head of the Department of Methodology at LSE. His earlier appointments include Professor of Quantitative Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, positions at the Central European University in Budapest, and a part-time professorship in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University.

Benoit received his PhD in Government with a specialization in statistical methodology from Harvard University in 1998. His research focuses on computational and quantitative methods for processing large amounts of textual data, primarily political texts and social media. This includes text mining, natural language processing, large language models, and machine learning applications in the social sciences. His substantive interests in political science encompass comparative party competition, the European Parliament, electoral systems, and the effects of campaign spending. He has contributed to large-scale measurement projects involving crowd-sourced data, expert surveys, manifesto coding, and text analysis for estimating policy positions of political parties.