About

Christopher Zorn is a Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, a Professor of Sociology and Criminology by courtesy, and an Affiliate Professor of Law at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on judicial politics and on computation and statistics for the social and behavioral sciences. He is also an Affiliate Faculty member of the Center for Social Data Analytics (C-SoDA) and serves as Associate Director of the BDSS-IGERT program. Zorn is involved in various academic activities, including being part of the Graduate Faculty and Program Committee for Social Data Analytics. His work integrates social science research with computational and statistical methods, contributing to the understanding of political and legal processes through data-driven approaches.

Research topics

• Political science
• Law
• Computer science
• Econometrics
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• The roles, responsibilities and activities of personnel specialists in the formulation of business and HRM strategies in the Scottish financial services industry

  Edinburgh Napier Research Repository (Edinburgh Napier University) · 2026-03-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This research project investigates the roles of Personnel/Human Resource Specialists in the formulation of corporate strategy. It aims at providing a better understanding of the current practice in comparison to "best practice" as prescribed by the leading literature. To this end a comprehensive literature review on strategy formulation and Human Resource Management (IBM) has been conducted. The core ideas from the leading literature have been concatenated in an integrated model of Human Resources( HR) in strategy formulation. This research project focuses exclusively on the first stage of the strategy process, namely formulation and blacks out the subsequent stages of implementation and evaluation. Particular emphasis is given to the rational, analytical aspect of strategy formulation. The elaborate model of integration delivered the basis for a detailed questionnaire which was used the means of collecting primary data. This questionnaire was sent out to over 100 key personnel in leading financial services companies in Scotland. The survey was the first of its kind to be conducted with an exclusive focus on the emerging Scottish financial community. The Scottish Financial sector employs 209.000 people and responses were received from 33 different companies which between them had 107.629 staff on their payrolls. The results of the study draw a detailed picture of the extent to which the proposed strategic activities are carried out by the HR functions of the leading Scottish institutions. The results furthermore indicate that Human Resources specialists are still finding it difficult to adapt a more strategic approach towards the management of employees. This study identified the analytical part of the strategy formulation process, i. e. the scanning of a company's environment for opportunities as well as the internal analysis of the firm as a weak point in the management of HR and as an area often neglected by Human Resource specialists. Due to this self-inflicted abstinence a vacuum is created and the influence that environmental changes can have on a firm's HR might well be underestimated. This lack of facts and data also meant that HR functions are often only partially integrated in the strategic decision-making process. The study identified this lethargy as the main area where improvements can be made and makes recommendations to industry and teaching academics alike. Finally, at the level of researchers and writers, this research project gives an opportunity to either replicate or validate the research findings or to widen the field by conducting further studies in this area.

  PublisherDOI

• Divergence or Dysfunction? Using LLMs to Measure Disagreement on the U.S. Supreme Court

  Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy · 2025-10-01

  articleSenior author

  For institutional decision-making bodies like the U.S.Supreme Court, interpersonal dynamics are central to the decision-making process, and the ability of even minimally empowered leaders is crucial in managing those dynamics. Prior research has extensively explored these questions, but measurement difficulties have limited scholarly consensus. Here, we propose a novel methodological approach to these questions, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to score the sentiment of judicial opinions, with a specific focus on differentiating normal jurisprudential disagreements from more personal/targeted criticisms within the Court’s opinions. Employing LLMs, we are able to differentiate between general and targeted criticism, then employ targeted criticism as a variant of aspect-level sentiment analysis over all majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions issued by the Court between 1954 and 2010. In doing so, we develop a measure of the degree of consensual and discordant content for each opinion, justice, and term of the Court. Our approach addresses the limitations of prior methods in distinguishing between what are generally regarded as healthy and unhealthy disagreements, and examining data at the opinion level provides further leverage on uncovering leadership effects. Our results provide new evidence of the chief justice’s role in building and maintaining consensus on the Court and suggest a historically unique modern Court increasingly willing to publicly express disagreement, with implications for understanding institutional debates more generally.

  PublisherDOI

• Legislating in the First Female Majority State Legislature: Gendered Power, Leadership, and Patterns of Sponsorship and Cosponsorship

  Political Research Quarterly · 2025-04-25 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  In 2019, the Nevada Legislature became the first state legislature in the nation to have a majority of female members; that was followed in 2023 by women holding majorities in both houses. Nevada thus offers a first-ever opportunity to study how a legislature is affected by majority female control. In this paper, we examine the implications of Nevada’s female majority for the way the legislature functions, with an emphasis on bill sponsorship and co-sponsorship. Feminist institutional theories suggest that while changes in majority control can undermine traditionally gendered institutional practices, such changes often depend on the work of “critical actors,” particularly those in positions of formal leadership. Drawing on a database of legislator sponsorship and co-sponsorship behavior across six recent legislative sessions (2013–2023), we find evidence that the evolution of women’s legislative power is largely attributable to majorities, rather than to leadership effects.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward Better Hiring Practices

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2021-04-29 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Toward Better Hiring Practices

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-02-01 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Replication files are also available at https://github.com/PrisonRodeo/TBHP-git.

  PublisherDOI

• The Accidental Methodologist

  Political pedagogies · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Overcoming the Barriers to Comparative Judicial Behavior Research

  University of Virginia Press eBooks · 2021-07-29 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• replication.tar.gz

  Harvard Dataverse · 2019-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Corpus-based dictionaries for sentiment analysis of specialized vocabularies

  Political Science Research and Methods · 2019-04-02 · 112 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of “minimally-supervised” approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in US federal appellate court decisions.

  PublisherDOI

• Motivation of student radiographers in learning situations based on role-play simulation: A multicentric approach involving trainers and students

  Radiography · 2018-10-05 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Decision Making in the Federal Judicial Hierarchy

  NSF · $143k · 2008–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Janet M. Box‐Steffensmeier

  The Ohio State University

  23 shared

• Zaryab Iqbal

  9 shared

• Laura W. Arnold

  9 shared

• Gregory A. Caldeira

  The Ohio State University

  8 shared

• Douglas Rice

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  5 shared

• Charles E. Smith

  University of Mississippi

  4 shared

• Clifford J. Carrubba

  Emory University

  4 shared

• Jason J. Czarnezki

  4 shared

Labs

• Social Data AnalyticsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Ohio State University

  1997