Neuer Gastprofessor: Robert Huckfeldt

The MZES welcomes Professor Robert Huckfeldt (University of California, Davis). He will be guest at the MZES until the end of October and hold an MZES Public Lecture on "Interdependence in the Formation of Public Opinion", October 30 (see link below).

Robert Huckfeldt is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Davis, former chair of the Department of Political Science, and former Director of the University of California Center Sacramento.

His primary research interests lie in participation, communication, and decision-making.  The unifying focus of his work is on individuals who are imbedded within social contexts and connected to one another through networks of communication. He has carried out studies of urban neighborhoods, national election studies, comparative studies of urban areas, and cross-national election studies, as well as experimental studies and dynamic simulations of political processes.  He is currently engaged in a study of political expertise within communication networks and the potential for individual level expertise to enhance the decision-making capacity of aggregate populations.  This project involves survey analysis, group based experiments, and agent based models.  In addition to scholarly articles, he is the author or coauthor of Politics in Context; Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics; Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication; and Political Disagreement.  His book with T.K. Ahn and John Barry Ryan – Experts, Activists, and Public Opinion Leadership – is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

He is the past president of the Midwest Political Science Association; past president of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association; and the past chair of the Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association.  He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.