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Pamela Ban – Co-Director
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Pamela Ban is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her primary research interests are in American politics and political economy. Her work focuses on electoral politics, legislatures, political parties, and how these institutions influence the behavior of political actors. Current projects examine congressional committees, power within Congress, lobbying, and the influence of gender in Congress.
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LaGina Gause – Co-Director
Assistant Professor of Political Science
LaGina Gause is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in American politics with a focus on race and ethnic politics, and inequality. Her current research projects explore the relationship between non-electoral participation and representation. She is working on a book manuscript exploring how who is protesting influences whether elected officials support protesters’ concerns.
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Marisa Abrajano
Professor of Political Science
Marisa Abrajano is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are in American politics, particularly racial and ethnic politics, political participation, voting and campaigns, and the mass media. She is the author of several books, the most recent one entitled White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics (with Zoltan Hajnal), published by Princeton University Press in 2015. It was the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Ralphe Bunche Award for the best book on Race and Politics in 2015. Her other award winning book, Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Television Advertising to Latinos , was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. She is also the author of New Faces, New Voices: The Hispanic Electorate in America (with R. Michael Alvarez) published by Princeton University Press in 2012. Her other work has been published in leading journals in political science.
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Amy Bridges
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Amy B. Bridges is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. A scholar of city politics, Bridges is the author of A City in the Republic, Antebellum New York and Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge, 1984) and Morning Glories, Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, 1997), which won two awards for best book published in 1997, Best Book in Urban Politics from the Urban Politics section of the APSA, and Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association. Bridges also co-edited, with Michael Javen Fortner, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy, the Historical and Institutional Roots of Local Politics and PublicPolicy (State University of New York Press, 2015), and Democratic Beginnings, Founding the Western States (University Press of Kansas, 2015) an account of the founding constitutional conventionsof the eleven western states, and the constitutions they wrote. I argue that their deliberations, from California in 1940 to New Mexico and Arizona in 1910, trace debates about politics and economics in the far west from the antebellum years to the election of Woodrow Wilson, the height of the Progressive Era. Bridges has served on the editorial boards of Politics & Society, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Policy History, and Studies in American Political Development. Persuaded that for too long political scientists and historians have neglected the western region, Bridges is currently writing a book about the founding constitutions of the eleven western states, Western Window, Constitutions, Politics, and Growth. Her research earned Bridges fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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James Fowler
Professor of Political Science
James Fowler earned a PhD from Harvard in 2003 and is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego. His work lies at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, with a focus on social networks, behavior, evolution, politics, genetics, and big data. James has been named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, TechCrunch's Top 20 Most Innovative People, Politico's 50 Key Thinkers, Doers, and Dreamers, and Most Original Thinker of the year by The McLaughlin Group.
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Zoltan Hajnal
Professor of Political Science
Zoltan Hajnal is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. A scholar of racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, immigration, and political behavior, Dr. Hajnal is the author of White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton 2015- Choice Outstanding Academic Title; Winner APSA Bunche Award), Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigration, and the Failure of Political Parties to Engage the Electorate (Princeton 2011 – Winner of the APSA’s Best Book on Race/Ethnicity), America’s Uneven Democracy: Race, Turnout, and Representation in City Politics (Cambridge 2010 – Winner of APSA’s Best Book on Urban Politics) and Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership (Cambridge 2006) and has published in the top political science journals and has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and a range of other media outlets. He has also worked hard to impact policy in the real world. His research on local election timing has led to the passage of state laws in California and Arizona that mandate on-cycle elections. He has served as an expert witness on Strict Voter Identification Law and Voting Rights Act cases.
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Seth Hill
Associate Professor of Political Science
Seth J. Hill is Associate Professor in Political Science. He studies how citizens motivate politician behavior with interests in how voters learn about politics, political participation, vote choice, and representation. He is the author of more than 20 published articles across the best outlets of political science including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics, among others. He has received grant funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of California Office of the President, has been invited to speak in seminar series around the country, and is interviewed by media outlets for his expertise on elections and voter behavior. His current projects include understanding the nature of electoral change in the United States, measuring bias and effectiveness in how citizens learn about politics, political misinformation, and challenges to political representation in heterogeneous societies. Hill previously held a postdoctoral appointment at Yale University and received his Ph.D. from UCLA.
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Thad Kousser
Professor of Political Science
Thad Kousser is a Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at UC San Diego. He studies American state and national politics, government reform, direct democracy, interest group influence, and how politicians use social media, and has authored or edited the books The Logic of American Politics, Politics in the American States, The Power of American Governors, The New Political Geography of California, Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism, and Adapting to Term Limits: Recent Experiences and New Directions. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, a 2015 Flinders Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Flinders University in Australia, received UCSD's Academic Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award, serves as co-editor of the journal Legislative Studies Quarterly, and has worked as a staff assistant in the California, New Mexico, and United States Senates. Kousser also comments on American politics for venues such as NPR, CNBC Asia, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
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Benjamin Noble
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Benjamin Noble is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His research in American politics focuses on the U.S. presidency and Congress, using game theoretic models and computational methods to analyze political rhetoric. His current projects consider the use of informational and emotional language in political speeches as well as how political conflict affects the separation of powers, providing insight into what politicians say and how they say it.
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Tom Wong
Associate Professor of Political Science
Tom K. Wong is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He served as an advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI) under the Obama administration where he co-led the immigration portfolio and was recently appointed by Governor Gerry Brown to serve on the State of California 2020 Census Complete Count Committee (CCC). His research focuses on the politics of immigration, citizenship, and migrant "illegality." His first book, Rights, Deportation, and Detention in the Age of Immigration Control, analyzes the immigration control policies of twenty-five Western immigrant-receiving democracies (Stanford University Press, 2015). And his second book, The Politics of Immigration: Partisanship, Demographic Change, and American National Identity (Oxford University Press, 2017), represents the most comprehensive analysis to date on the contemporary politics of immigration in the United States. Wong and his work has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NPR and major media outlets across the country. He is also on the leadership committee of the California Immigrant Policy Center and the board of New American Leaders.