WashU Political Science

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WashU Political Science

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The Department of Political Science at WashU

The Department of Political Science offers undergraduates the opportunity to study all aspects of politics using cutting-edge technical and theoretical tools. Our courses are animated by longstanding problems related to the use of power, its rightful exercise by governments and individual actors, and the institutions that affect how that power is exercised. Reflecting the breadth of the discipline, we offer a range of classes, including courses on elections and electoral politics; international political economy; justice and the state; and comparative analyses of political institutions across states.

10/21/2026

Political Science Post-Doc, and current job market candidate, Matthew Ribar, has co-authored a new article for the Journal of Peace Research.

The article, titled, "Belonging, violence, and natural resource governance: experimental evidence from Mali and Niger," uses a vignette survey experiment of rural household heads in Mali and Niger to examine the effectiveness of community-led and state-led interventions meant to "strengthen natural resource governance institutions." The article "advances our understanding of natural resource governance under institutional pluralism, explores the endogenous relationship between state capacity and armed conflict, and identifies potential limits on the extent to which strengthening local institutions can substitute for low state capacity."

Read more about the article on our website: https://buff.ly/4zkyq7q

10/20/2026

Betsy Sinclair, Chair of Political Science and Vice Provost of Innovation, recently had her research highlighted in an article from WashU's The Source.

The research, featured in Sinclair's co-authored study published in the journal, Royal Society Open Science, looks at using AI to counter the spread of election misinformation. Sinclair and her co-authors from the California Institute of Technology offer a scalable AI-assisted framework that could be quickly deployed to challenge election misinformation.

Read more about Sinclair's timely research in The Source: https://buff.ly/bOLQsqT

10/19/2026

Professor of political science and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dan Butler, has co-authored a new article in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

The article, titled, "The primary premium: Why legislators are incentivized to side with primary voters over general election voters," explains how politicians are incentivized to cater more to their primary electorate than voters in the general. The research − based off extensive analysis of existing surveys and original surveys − shows that primary voters are both more unified and more likely to adjust their vote choice based on policy alignment.

Read more about the article on our website: https://buff.ly/Zm7dZtM

10/16/2026

A group of political science students inspired by the political science course, “Topics in Politics: The Politics of Plastics" taught by Professor Dino Christenson, decided to audit their own plastic usage and the usage of the university.

After spending some time looking at their own usage, the usage of the university dining partners, and discussions with those partners, they came together and published an opinion letter to Student Life. Read more about what they discovered on the Student Life website: https://buff.ly/yqNuxUd

10/09/2026

PhD candidate Alex Avery (), has been selected at a 2026 Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence awardee.

Avery’s nomination and selection is a result of her impressive achievements distinguishing her among the top 5% of all graduate students educated and trained in the department.

Read more about the award on our website: https://buff.ly/k8HO95n

10/07/2026

Lukas Alexander, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and Weidenbaum Center Graduate Research Affiliate, has published his article, ‘The Punitive Dimension of Presidential Particularism,’ in the American Political Science Review, the discipline’s leading journal.

In the article, Alexander examines whether presidents use administrative power to impose costs on politically oppositional constituencies, showing that DOGE contract cuts were disproportionately concentrated in counties that provided weaker electoral support for President Trump.

Read his article and research on our department site: https://buff.ly/KLUOqY0

09/28/2026

Professor Jacob Montgomery was recently interviewed by mid-Missouri NPR station, KBIA, about AI use in local government.

The article is focused on a recent decision by the board of aldermen of Centralia, MO, to regulate use of AI by city employees. The main regulation is that employees must be able "to verify the accuracy of any generated content," and can face disciplinary action or be fired if they violate uses of generative AI set by their supervisors.

Montgomery discusses the use of AI in general by government entities:

“You would not want it to write messages out to citizens in emergency situations where humans haven’t had a chance to review the content,” Montgomery said. “I think small governments are also disadvantaged because creating customized AI infrastructure that, for instance, runs on local compute infrastructure so that data isn’t transferred to third parties can be quite expensive and require specialized staff that they may not have."

Read the full article and Montgomery's comments on the KBIA website: https://buff.ly/9MAsnQM

09/02/2026

Hwayong Shin, Weidenbaum Center Post-Doctoral Fellow in Survey Research, has published the first wave of the Weidenbaum Center Survey Reports — a look into the issues Americans believe are shaping politics and society today. The reports provide accessible, data-driven insights into American public opinion.

Read about the reports on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/post-doc-hwayong-shin-publishes-weidenbaum-center-survey-reports

08/31/2026

Associate Professor Christopher Lucas has received the 2026 Emerging Scholar Award from The Society for Political Methodology.

The award is given each year to honor "a young researcher, within ten years of their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of political methodology."

The Society for Political Methodology was created to "facilitate and further the academic endeavors of its members, including the production and dissemination of their research, the enhancement and reach of their pedagogy, and the quality and quantity of their service in political methodology, i.e., in research methodology and design, in data collection and measurement, in statistics, and in theoretical and empirical modeling in Political Science."

Read more about the award on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/christopher-lucas-receives-emerging-scholar-award-society-political-methodology

08/21/2026

The American Political Science Association (APSA) recently announced their 2026 individual section awards, and multiple WashU Political Science faculty members were named award recipients.

According to the APSA website, these awards were created "In an effort to bring attention to exceptional scholarship...Currently there are more than 100 such awards honoring dissertations, papers, articles, books and career achievement."

You can view the full list of WashU PoliSci award winners on our website: https://polisci.washu.edu/news/washu-political-science-faculty-receive-multiple-section-awards-apsa

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St. Louis, MO
63130

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+13149355810

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