Usern_member

Christopher Wlezien

USERN Advisory Board

Hogg Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin


 


Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. 
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1989 and his B.A. from Saint Xavier College (Chicago) in 1984 and previously taught at Oxford University, the University of Houston, and Temple University. 
He also has holds or has held visiting positions at various universities, including Australian National University, European University Institute (Florence), Juan March Institute (Madrid), University of Mannheim (Germany), Sciences Po (Paris), and the University of Manchester (UK).


 


His primary, ongoing research develops a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy and examines the dynamic interrelationships between preferences and policy in various domains. A cross-national investigation focusing on the US, the UK, and Canada is the subject of a book titled Degrees of Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press.


 


His other major area of research addresses the evolution of voter preferences expressed in pre-election polls over the course of the election cycle. It has been the subject of numerous articles on the US and a book The Timeline of Presidential Elections that was published by the University of Chicago Press.


 


Wlezien was founding co-editor of the international Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, and he currently is Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, Research and Politics, and Parliamentary Affairs and a member of the editorial boards of six other journals. At the University of Texas, he is chair of the methods field in the Department of Government and a faculty affiliate of the Policy Agendas Project and the Center for European Studies. 


 


Biography









Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government. He joined the University of Texas faculty in 2013 from Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously he taught at Oxford University, where he was Reader of Comparative Government and a Fellow of Nuffield College. While at Oxford, he co-founded the ESRC-funded Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. Before that, he taught at the University of Houston, where he was founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. He holds or has held visiting positions at Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Australian National University, Columbia University, University of Copenhagen, European University Institute (Florence), Instituto Empresa (Madrid), Juan March Institute (Madrid), University of Mannheim (Germany), McGill University (Montreal), Sciences Po (Paris), and the University of Manchester (UK). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1989 and his B.A. from Saint Xavier College (Chicago) in 1984.



His primary, ongoing research develops a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy and examines the dynamic interrelationships between preferences for spending and budgetary policy in various domains. A cross-national investigation focusing on the US, the UK, and Canada is the subject of a book titled Degrees of Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press. A more recent article tests theories about the effects of federalism, executive-legislative imbalance, and the proportionality of electoral systems in 17 countries. A related volume on Who Gets Represented?, published by the Russell Sage Foundation, investigates representational inequality in the US and stimulated a more recent article. Current research in the area considers news coverage and how it mediates public responsiveness to policy, and there is related work comparing dictionary and supervised learning methods to automated content analysis. A book on the broader subject, entitled Information and Democracy: Public Policy in the News, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

His other major area of research addresses the evolution of voter preferences expressed in pre-election polls over the course of an election cycle. It has been the subject of numerous articles on the US and a book The Timeline of Presidential Elections that was published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press. A related e-book The 2012 Election and the Timeline of Presidential Elections was published in 2014 and there is similar research on the UK.  His current work in the area undertakes cross-national analysis, the first article on which examines how political institutions condition the structure and evolution of electoral preferences in more than 300 elections in over 40 countries. A related article assesses pre-election poll errors in those elections, data for which is publicly available at my poll datasets site. Recent methodological research explores issues in the application of the “timeline” approach to studying electoral dynamics, and points to an approach for simultaneously assessing the effects of different system, party, and election-level variables.   

He has produced other substantive and methodological research on a variety of related topics, including electoral institutions and representation, mass media and public responsiveness to policy, public perceptions of political parties, economic voting, public opinion polling, election prediction and forecasting, the mass media and election campaigns, mass media coverage of the economy, policy voting, and time series analysis, all of which is listed on his CV and posted here.

Wlezien was founding co-editor of the international Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties and Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, Research and Politics, and Parliamentary Affairs and also a member of the editorial boards of eight other journals. He is President of the Southern Political Science Association after chairing the program for the 2019 annual meeting held in Austin.  At the University of Texas, he is a faculty affiliate of the Policy Agendas Project and the Center for European Studies. 

 


Interests



Public opinion, public policy, political institutions, elections, mass media, research methods



 


Google scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=2yuy4j0AAAAJ&hl=en


 


 


https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/cw26629




 



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