About

Christopher Wlezien is the Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, within the College of Liberal Arts. His research focuses on public opinion, public policy, political institutions, elections, mass media, and research methods. As a distinguished faculty member, he contributes to the academic community through his expertise in these areas, engaging in scholarly activities that explore the dynamics of political behavior and institutional processes.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Microeconomics
• Econometrics
• Law
• Economics
• Operations management
• Public relations
• Public administration
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Negativity and Misinformation

  Political Communication · 2026-02-25

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Public opinion and the news: Polls and journalists’ perceptions of issue importance

  Research & Politics · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Most work on the media and the public starts from the premise that coverage influences opinion and behavior. We report results of a field experiment attempting to identify whether the reverse is true. Specifically, we examine the effects of providing public opinion information to journalists on their perceptions of the newsworthiness of different topics. We randomly assigned journalists to receive results of a survey of Americans about the importance of different political issues, and followed up with a survey of those journalists (from a different source) asking about the newsworthiness of stories about those issues. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that public opinion influences journalists’ perceptions of topical newsworthiness, particularly on low salience issues, and also allow us to rule out large opinion effects on journalists’ perceptions of the newsworthiness of certain issues. The effects appear to be more pronounced for those journalists with less experience in the communities in which they currently work. Overall, we see the research as both offering insight into the nature of the effects that public opinion has on news coverage and helping guide future research, which we consider in the concluding section.

  PublisherDOI

• Time-Varying Relationships Between the “Sentiment” of U.S. Public Opinion and News Media

  International Journal of Public Opinion Research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract Pollsters and journalists in the United States often make generalized statements about the state of the country, in particular, its “mood” or “sentiment.” The claims often rely on responses to survey questions asking about the state of the country. Little is known about the ebb and flow of this sentiment, however. This paper develops a measure of public sentiment, pooling results of thousands of polls between 2000 and 2021. It then develops an analogous measure of media sentiment based on a content analysis of millions of network television news transcripts. Analyses explore differences across data sources (i.e., polling houses and television networks) and consider the relationship between public and media sentiment. Results suggest that the measures are correlated concurrently, and there is some evidence that public sentiment responds to earlier media coverage. However, connections between the measures wax and wane over time, highlighting the potential importance of accounting for time-varying parameters in the study of public opinion and media effects.

  PublisherDOI

• What moves (spending) mood? The nature and origins of parallel public preferences

  Political Science Research and Methods · 2025-08-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract While research shows that public preferences across policy domains tend to move in parallel, the mechanisms behind this dynamic remain unclear. We examine four explanations: (1) alignment in preferred policy levels; (2) parallel policy movement combined with domain-specific thermostatic feedback; (3) feedback to global policy across domains; and (4) responsiveness to presidential partisanship. These mechanisms matter for how we interpret public opinion change and policy responsiveness. We develop and test a theoretical model using data on four social spending domains in the USA. Our findings suggest that spending mood reflects both parallelism in preferred policy levels and responsiveness to overall social spending and presidential party affiliation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Estimating public opinion from surveys: the impact of including a “don't know” response option in policy preference questions

  Political Science Research and Methods · 2024-09-16 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract What are the consequences of including a “don't know” (DK) response option to attitudinal survey questions? Existing research, based on traditional survey modes, argues that it reduces the effective sample size without improving the quality of responses. We contend that it can have important effects not only on estimates of aggregate public opinion, but also on estimates of opinion differences between subgroups of the population who have different levels of political information. Through a pre-registered online survey experiment conducted in the United States, we find that the DK response option has consequences for opinion estimates in the present day, where most organizations rely on online panels, but mainly for respondents with low levels of political information and on low salience issues. These findings imply that the exclusion of a DK option can matter, with implications for assessments of preference differences and our understanding of their impacts on politics and policy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dictionaries, Supervised Learning, and Media Coverage of Public Policy

  2024-10-08

  book-chapterSenior author

  There are many different approaches to automated content analysis. This paper focuses on dictionaries and supervised learning; in addition to comparing the effectiveness of the two, we argue for the advantages of using them in combination. We do so in a research area in which we have an independent objective referent: government spending. With an eye toward capturing the accuracy of media coverage on public policy, we apply both hierarchical dictionary counts and supervised learning to measure mass media coverage of change in US defense spending. Both approaches appear to do well at capturing a media “policy signal” in the area, which provides an important test of convergent validity. While the results highlight the value of both dictionary and machine learning methods used independently, they also illustrate ways in which the two can be used in combination.

  PublisherDOI

• A Thermostatic Model of Congressional Elections

  American Politics Research · 2024-05-22 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  Are policymakers rewarded in elections when they succeed in moving public policy in their ideological direction? Or do they face a thermostatic backlash, as citizens judge their policy moves as too hot or too cold? Our analysis of Congressional election outcomes since 1948 adds information on Congressional policy actions to traditional election models emphasizing the surge and decline of presidential support and referendums based on presidential approval and the economy. We find that the electorate reacts to the ideological direction of policy, voting against parties that push policy further to the left or the right in both midterm and presidential years. Even after accounting for policy and traditional explanations, however, there remains a large midterm penalty for the president’s party.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for "News and Public Opinion: Which Comes First?"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-01-09

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Datasets and code to produce figures and tables in the article to be published in the Journal of Politics.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring public preferences for government spending under constraints: a conjoint-analytic approach

  Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties · 2023-03-15 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Governmental budgets and the priorities they reflect are the subjects of recurring political debate. Research on political representation commonly focuses on relative spending preferences, mostly in isolated domains that are unconstrained, and so provides only limited information about people’s preferences. Recent survey work considers the effects of asking about absolute spending levels in different substantive areas and in the face of revenue constraints. No studies do all three, though two studies get close and provide more fine-grained measures of preferences for spending change. We follow their lead but in a more general way, offering budget profiles that include increases as well as decreases in spending levels, embedded in a conjoint experiment in Sweden. Our results reveal that people appear to hold preferences on specific magnitudes of spending change, budgetary constraints matter, and the effects of increases and decreases in spending are not symmetrical. Although the implied preferences for spending are similar in direction to expressed relative preferences that are unconstrained, the levels of support across domains are different. The findings have implications for assessments of opinion representation, as inferences about the responsiveness of policy to preferences – and the congruence between them – differ depending on measurement of the latter.

  PublisherDOI

• News and Public Opinion: Which Comes First?

  The Journal of Politics · 2023-07-26 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Much research demonstrates a positive association between news coverage and public opinion, both perceptions and preferences. While this relationship is clear, what accounts for it is not. The assumption in most previous research is that media causes public opinion. But there is reason to expect that the causality runs in the other direction as well. In this article, I describe the logic of two-way flows and then undertake an analysis of three different cases of US public opinion over time—economic perceptions, candidate support, and policy preferences—using measures of the content of news coverage based on automated content analyses. Vector autoregression results indicate that opinion “causes” coverage in every case, and the reverse holds less frequently and always to a lesser degree. The results underscore the role the public can play in news coverage, one that always should be entertained and assessed empirically, not settled by assumption.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Mass Media and Representative Democracy

  NSF · $88k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Stuart Soroka

  87 shared

• Robert S. Erikson

  Columbia University

  71 shared

• Will Jennings

  University of Southampton

  32 shared

• Joseph Bafumi

  Dartmouth College

  29 shared

• James Adams

  University of California, Davis

  28 shared

• Simon Weschle

  23 shared

• Michael S. Lewis‐Beck

  University of Iowa

  14 shared

• Costas Panagopoulos

  13 shared

Labs

• Digital AccessibilityPI