Research
Books
Iliev, Iliyan R. Terrorism and Social Media: Statistics as a Weapon. Taylor & Francis/Chapman & Hall. (under contract)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Sunkara, Vishwamithra, Jason Mckenna, Soumyashree Kar, Iliyan Iliev, and Diana Bernstein. (2023). "The Gulf of Mexico in Trouble: Big Data Solutions to Climate Change Science." Frontiers in Marine Science. 10: 396.
Iliev, Iliyan R., Tom Rishel, and Bo Li. (2022). "Semantic Analysis of Arab Leaders on Social Media". The Social Science Journal.
Iliev, Iliyan R. (2021). "The Power Dynamics of Campaign Contributions and Legislative Rhetoric". Interest Groups & Advocacy. 10: 240-263.
Iliev, Iliyan R. and Patrick T. Brandt. (2021). "Money and Rhetoric: Energy Sector Dynamics in U.S. Senate Committee". The Social Science Journal. 58(4): 440-457.
Coleman, Marcus, Marek Steedman, and Iliyan Iliev. (2021). "Conceptualizing Black Political Disillusionment: Stories from New Orleans". National Review of Black Politics. 2(2): 107-130.
Iliev, Iliyan R., Xin Huang, and Yulia R. Gel. (2020). "Speaking out or speaking in? Changes in political rhetoric over time". Significance. 17(5): 22-25.
Appice, Annalisa, Yulia R. Gel, Iliyan Iliev, Vyacheslav Lyubchich, and Donato Malerba. (2020). "A Multi-Stage Machine Learning Approach to Predict Dengue Incidence: A Case Study in Mexico". IEEE Access. 8(1): 52713-52725.
Steedman, Marek, Iliyan R. Iliev, Allan McBride, Marcus Coleman. (2019). "Striking a Blow For Unity?: Race and Economics in the 2010 New Orleans Mayoral Election". Political Science Quarterly. 134(4): 611-640.
Iliev, Iliyan R., Xin Huang, and Yulia R. Gel. (2018). "Political Rhetoric through the Lens of Non-parametric Statistics: Are Our Legislators That Different?". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 182: 583-604.
Huang, Xin, Iliyan R. Iliev, Vyacheslav Lyubchich, and Yulia R. Gel. (2017). "Riding Down the Bay: Space-Time Clustering of Ecological Trends". Environmetrics. 29(5-6): e2455.
Huang, Xin, Iliyan R. Iliev, Alexander Brenning, Yulia R. Gel. (2016). "Space-Time Clustering with Stability Probe while Riding Downhill". SIGKDD Mining and Learning from Time Series.
Book Chapters
Iliev, Iliyan R. 2018. "Big Groups, Big Money: Interest Groups in Texas" Texas: Yesterday and Today, Texas Politics and Public Policy. Euel Elliott and Doug Goodman, eds. Great River Learning. ISBN: 9781680754483
Iliev, Iliyan R. 2018. "At the Ballot Box: Voting and Elections in Texas" Texas: Yesterday and Today, Texas Politics and Public Policy. Euel Elliott and Doug Goodman, eds. Great River Learning. ISBN: 9781680754483
Grants
2023–2026 Minerva Research Initiative, US Department of Defense. Award # FA9550-23-1-0471. Managed by Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “Resurgent Powers, Nontraditional Threats, and Emerging Technologies: Deterrence in a Multilevel Network Framework.” Brandon Kinne, Iliyan Iliev and Juan Tellez. Award amount: $1,354,670
You can find my Google Scholar page here.
My research focuses on uncovering complex social and political dynamics, and the development of novel research methods to study such behavior.
Social and Political Dynamics
My three general areas of interest are:
Legislative behavior/campaign contributions
I am interested in uncovering the dynamic interactions between legislative behavior and campaign contributions. To study legislative behavior in the U.S. Congress, I developed a measure of congressional speech based on Senators’ attitudes towards organized interests. I then study the hidden patterns in the behavior of Senators as a function of their time in office. The legislative behavior is also linked with the campaign contributions that the Senators have received. I study the dynamic endogenous interactions of campaign contributions to members of the U.S. Senate and their reactions.
Terrorism/protests/societal instability
Another area of my research is terrorism and protests/social instability. I study the use of social media by political leaders and by terrorist organizations, and how the medium affects the spread of terrorist networks. I also study the connection between social media posts by political leaders and terrorist organizations, and terrorist events – I attempt to uncover the dynamics between terrorist attacks and such social media activity. Additionally, I study the connection between protests and terrorist events, and whether various levels of social instability lead or lag increases in terrorist activity.
Voting/electoral participation
I study the drivers of electoral participation at the state and local level. I am interested in analyzing the economic and racial contexts exhibited in the electoral behavior of voters, as well as the effects of race, partisan identity, turnout, and political disillusion on voting behavior.
Research Methodology
My research agenda required the creation of a number of innovative methodological tools. I developed several natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that were used in my work on legislative behavior/campaign contributions and my work on terrorism. The first NLP algorithm allowed me to study the political expressions and attitudinal data expressed in the statements of U.S. Senators during committee hearings. My work on the political rhetoric in Congressional committees is novel in the literature and such statements were never analyzed before. The second NLP algorithm, developed collaboratively, allowed me to study the expressions of Arabic leaders on social media, which was also a procedure that was not available prior. Additionally, to study the patterns of behavior of Senators over time, I developed (as part of a collaborative team), a space-time dynamic clustering algorithm, which allows the automatic selection of tuning parameters when clustering.
