About

James Henson is the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. His work involves conducting regular, non-partisan, statewide polls of registered voters in Texas, and making the results and data available for public use. His research focuses on Texas politics and government, public opinion, and electoral behavior, providing analysis and insights through various publications, podcasts, and educational resources. Henson's contributions include overseeing the Texas Politics Project's efforts to gather and analyze polling data, produce educational content such as webtexts and courses, and facilitate discussions on key political issues affecting Texas.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Law
• Computer Security
• Data science
• Public relations
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Public administration
• Gender studies
• Algorithm
• Development economics
• Engineering ethics
• Political economy
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts

  Social Science Computer Review · 2026-04-27

  articleOpen access

  Topic discovery and integration are vital for maintaining vocabularies that categorize textual corpora. Automated approaches are often computationally expensive and lack domain-specific conceptual nuance; manual approaches are costly in terms of time and potential bias. To address this dilemma, we introduce the segments-as-topic (SAT) methodology, a four-stage process that combines automation and human expertise to assess candidate topics for vocabulary inclusion. In the SAT generation stage, a topic is formulated and refined through collaboration with domain experts, and then a sentence-level semantic similarity model retrieves corpus segments semantically aligned with the topic. The SAT expansion stage uses this seed set to find additional semantically similar segments, which are iteratively accepted or rejected to build a final segment set. During the review stage, a panel of scholars evaluates the topic for inclusion. In the integration stage, all segments in the final segment set are automatically tagged with the new topic. We apply this methodology to the Comparative Constitutions Project vocabulary that tracks over 330 topics in national constitutions, and demonstrate the addition of three new topics to the vocabulary. The SAT approach balances computational efficiency with expert judgment, offering a systematic, user-friendly, and replicable framework for social scientists to expand domain-specific vocabularies.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-04-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Semantics

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-04-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Notes on Teaching Concept Analysis

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-04-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contrariness and Contradiction in Constitutional Law

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-03-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jacobsohn highlights the tension both within constitutional systems and between constitutions and societal norms (culture). In this essay, we explore the first tension and glance at the second. One objective of the essay is to enumerate a set of "disharmonies" that appear with some frequency within constitutions and, employing historical data, identify the constitutional systems that contain them. Appealing to formal logic, we develop a taxonomy that helps us understand the kinds of disharmonies on display; a taxonomy that points to their sources. The essay thus generalizes Jacobsohn's notion of disharmony and extends his insights from a small set of cases that begin with the letter "I" to a larger set.

  PublisherDOI

• Which Constitutional Provisions Are Most Important?

  European journal of empirical legal studies · 2024-05-13 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  National constitutions codify provisions on a wide range of topics, ranging from presidential term limits to the country’s flag. But are all constitutional provisions equally important? Some are likely to be particularly consequential for how governments function, while others are likely to be largely symbolic. To date, there has been little research on the relative importance of constitutional provisions. To explore current thinking on this subject, we assembled a group of twelve comparative constitutional scholars to rate the relative importance of 340 constitutional provisions to the functioning of a country’s government. These aggregate ratings make three contributions to constitutional studies: (1) provide evidence on the current state of academic thought on the comparative importance of constitutional provisions; (2) establish an index of constitutional importance to be used in future research projects; and (3) offer a roadmap that could help direct research to provisions that may be more likely to have significant impacts on governance-related outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Which Constitutional Provisions are Most Important?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Zachary Elkins, Review of Donald L. Horowitz, Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment

  International Journal of Constitutional Law · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Zachary Elkins, Review of Donald L. Horowitz, Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment Get access Donald L. Horowitz. Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment. Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. 288, £40.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-25436-5. Zachary Elkins Zachary Elkins University of Texas at Austin, United States Email:zelkins@austin.utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 21, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 369–372, https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/moad022 Published: 03 May 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Concept Regulation in the Social Sciences

  2023-04-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The sciences, notably biology and medicine, operate with highly regulated taxonomies and ontologies. The Social Sciences, on the other hand, muddle through in a proverbial tower of Babel. There may be some real benefits to an undisciplined set of ideas, but also some real costs. Over the last ten years, political scientists have attempted to get their semantic act by cooperating to formalize their vocabulary. The result has been a dramatic improvement in how scholars diagnose and treat problems of democracy, as well as a set of web applications that have changed the way countries write constitutions. Nevertheless, these methods of semantic cooperation have exposed some persistent challenges of “social engineering,” ones that may have tractable web solutions.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring constitutional preferences: A new method for analyzing public consultation data

  PLoS ONE · 2023-12-14 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Public consultation has become an indispensable part of constitutional design, yet the voluminous, narrative data produced are often impractical to analyze. There are also few, if any, standards for such analysis. Using a comprehensive reference ontology from the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP), we develop a new methodology to identify constitutional topics of most concern to citizens and compare these to topics in constitutions globally. We analyze data from Chile's 2016 public consultations-an ambitious process that produced nearly 265,000 narrative responses and launched the constitutional reform process that remains underway today. We leverage advances in natural language processing, in particular sentence-level semantic similarity technology, to classify consultation responses with respect to constitutional topics. Our methodology has potential for advocates, drafters, and researchers seeking to analyze public consultation data that too often go unexamined.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Formal Characteristics of National Constitutions: A Cross-National Historical Dataset

  NSF · $97k · 2008–2009

• Formal Characteristics of National Constitutions: A Cross-National Historical Dataset

  NSF · $197k · 2007–2009

• Concept Integration in Comparative Law: Linking Constitutional, Consultation, and Court Analysis

  NSF · $450k · 2023–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Tom Ginsburg

  101 shared

• James Melton

  Lakeland Regional Medical Center

  43 shared

• Beth A. Simmons

  35 shared

• José Antônio Cheibub

  23 shared

• Andrew T. Guzmán

  VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System

  9 shared

• Justin Blount

  Stephen F. Austin State University

  8 shared

• Scott J. Spitzer

  California State University, Fullerton

  8 shared

• Jonas Tallberg

  Stockholm University

  5 shared

Labs

• The Texas Politics ProjectPI

  The Texas Politics Project conducts regular, non-partisan, statewide polls of registered voters in Texas, and makes the results and data available for public use.

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  University of California

  2003

• M.A., Government

  University of Texas at Austin

  1996

• B.A., Philosophy

  Yale University

  1992