Welcome!
I am the Daniel H. Wallace Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. My research interests are in comparative political behavior, public opinion, democratization, and quantitative methods. I have a decades-long interest in the effects of civic education and democracy promotion programs on the development of democratic attitudes, political support, and political participation. Much of my academic work stems from evaluations I have conducted of the US and other international donors’ democracy and countering violent extremism programs in countries such as South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso. Most recently, I have been a member of the international project DEMED (Democracy under Threat: How Education can Save it), which is investigating the impact of online adult civic education in promoting democratic values and engagement.
I am the author of Causal Analysis with Panel Data (Sage Publications, 1995) and several other methodological pieces on the potential and pitfalls of longitudinal data analysis in political and social science. I received my PhD in 1984 in political science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, I taught at the University of Virginia and held a joint appointment as Professor of Applied Quantitative and Qualitative Methods from 2005 to 2008 at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany. From 2001 to 2018, I served as Chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Political Science.
Research Interests
Teaching
I have taught courses in comparative political behavior, longitudinal data analysis and other topics in social science methodology. The materials for all of these classes can be found here or under the Teaching link above.