Austin Hart

I am a political scientist in the newly-formed Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics. I study electoral politics and democratic accountability through the lens of political psychology. I’m especially interested in how our attitudes about politics form and change over time and how that impacts voting behavior. I also work on questions about the design and generalizability of “synthetic” experiments in the behavioral sciences.

In addition to peer-reviewed articles, I have written two books on retrospective voting–the phenomenon of citizens registering their appraisals of past performance in their judgment of incumbents. The most recent book, Quality Control (2023, Cambridge University Press), develops a new theoretical and methodological framework for studying the cognitive foundations of retrospective voting.

I teach graduate courses in research design, data analytics, and quantitative methodology. I also oversee the graduate-level Research and Professional Methods curriculum at the School of International Service. To date, I have planned and staffed roughly 300 classes in research methods.