Christopher Wlezien

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

Selected publications

• Information and Democracy

  2022 · 49 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Around the world, there are increasing concerns about the accuracy of media coverage. It is vital in representative democracies that citizens have access to reliable information about what is happening in government policy, so that they can form meaningful preferences and hold politicians accountable. Yet much research and conventional wisdom questions whether the necessary information is available, consumed, and understood. This study is the first large-scale empirical investigation into the fr…

  DOI

• Election forecasting: Too far out?

  International Journal of Forecasting · 2020 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Information, incentives, and goals in election forecasts

  Judgment and Decision Making · 2020 · 29 citations

  Abstract Presidential elections can be forecast using information from political and economic conditions, polls, and a statistical model of changes in public opinion over time. However, these “knowns” about how to make a good presidential election forecast come with many unknowns due to the challenges of evaluating forecast calibration and communication. We highlight how incentives may shape forecasts, and particularly forecast uncertainty, in light of calibration challenges. We illustrate these…

  DOI

• Media Reflect! Policy, the Public, and the News

  American Political Science Review · 2023-09-28 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Mass media are often portrayed as having large effects on democratic politics. Media content is not simply an exogenous influence on publics and policymakers, however. There is reason to think that this content reflects publics and politics as much as—if not more than—it affects them. This letter examines those possibilities, focusing on interactions between news coverage, budgetary policy, and public preferences in the defense, welfare, and health-care domains in the United States. Results indi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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—econo…

  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

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