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Organizers | Scholars | Press & Practitioners

CCPS and Conference Organizers

Founded in 1979, American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies (CCPS) serves scholars, students, policymakers and the public by propelling actionable research, providing public education and promoting reasonable democratic commerce. CCPS's faculty, research fellows, executives-in-residence and students have completed hundreds of research projects, which have been broadly disseminated as books, scientific research articles, popular press articles, video documentaries and audio stories. Many of these projects have enjoyed support from external funders, totaling over $50 million. CCPS also administers the Campaign Management Institute and the Public Affairs and Advocacy Institute, and publishes the political science journal Congress and the Presidency. The CCPS has hosted over 350 public symposia and conferences that bring together policymakers, politicos, researchers, journalists, and other public intellectuals to contemplate pressing political and policy issues. In 2014, CCPS convened a large conference on political polarization, coordinating participation from the nation's leading researchers on the subject. The conference's proceedings led to publication of American Gridlock: The Sources, Character and Impact of Political Polarization (2015; Cambridge University Press).

David C. Barker is Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies and Professor of Government at American University. He has authored or co-authored three university press books and dozens of peer-reviewed political science journal articles (in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly and many others) on the subjects of American political parties, campaigns/elections, representation, culture/polarization, ideology/attitudes, information/communication, and institutions (Congress and the Presidency). He has served as principle investigator on more than 60 grant/contract-supported research projects -- totaling more than $11 million -- including support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, HUD, and many others. His first book, Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior (2002; Columbia University Press), was nominated for several national awards. His second book, Representing Red and Blue: How the Culture Wars Change the Way Citizens Speak and Politicians Listen (2012; Oxford University Press) has been featured in prominent national media outlets including the Washington Post and Vox. His third book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy, is forthcoming in 2018. He is frequently quoted in and cited by the New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Atlantic, and several other national media outlets news media outlets.

Elizabeth Suhay is Assistant Professor of Government at American University and a Fellow at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. Suhay specializes in the study of public opinion, political psychology, and political communication. Her current research agenda rests at the intersection of politics and scientific knowledge. She is interested in why many topics, ranging from climate change to explanations for socioeconomic inequality, have become so politicized in recent years and how scientists, science communicators, and policymakers can work together to ensure quality science informs the policymaking process. Suhay is the author of over twenty scholarly articles and other works, with her research appearing in The American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, among other journals. She recently received funding from the National Academy of Sciences for the project, Evidence-Based Science Communication to Policymakers, a collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is the co-editor, with James N. Druckman, of the 2015 issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "The Politics of Science: Political Values and the Production, Communication, and Reception of Scientific Knowledge."

Ron Elving is Senior Editor and Correspondent on the Washington Desk for NPR News, where he is frequently heard as a news analyst and writes regularly for NPR.org. During his tenure as the manager of NPR's Washington coverage, NPR reporters were awarded every major recognition available in radio journalism, including the Dirksen Award for Congressional Reporting and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2008, the American Political Science Association awarded NPR the Carey McWilliams Award "in recognition of a major contribution to the understanding of political science." Elving was previously the political editor for USA Today and for Congressional Quarterly. Ron's book, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law, was published by Simon & Schuster and is also a Touchstone paperback.

Betsy Fischer Martin is an Emmy-winning journalist and TV news executive. Currently she is an Executive in Residence at American University's School of Public Affairs and the co-host of Bloomberg Politics' Masters in Politics Podcast. She also founded her own consulting business, Fischer Martin Media, where she specializes in providing media training to corporate executives. During her earlier career in television news, she was the Managing Editor of NBC News Political Programming, where she was responsible for the development and execution of network political coverage. Before being promoted to the executive role at NBC News in 2013, Fischer Martin was the executive producer of the top-rated Sunday morning public affairs program, Meet the Press, for 11 years. Overall, her tenure with the program extended over 22 years, beginning as an internship during her senior year of college. She serves on the Board of Directors of Washington's International Women's Forum and the National Press Club's Journalism Institute. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.

Confirmed Scholarly Participants

Kevin Arceneaux is Professor of Political Science, Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Public Affairs, and Director of the Behavioral Foundations Lab at Temple University. He studies political communication, political psychology, and political behavior, focusing on the interaction between political messages and people's political predispositions. His recent book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels: Partisan News in an Age of Choice (2013, University of Chicago Press, co-authored with Martin Johnson) was co-winner of the 2014 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard University Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In 2012, Professor Arceneaux received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). He also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Experimental Political Science and, along with Cindy Kam, as a co-editor for the Routledge Series on Experimental Political Science. Professor Arceneaux has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, CIRCLE, and Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences. His work appears in numerous scholarly journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Communication, Political Psychology, and Political Analysis.

Adam Berinsky is the Mitsui Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). He is the author of In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America (Princeton University Press, 2004). He has published articles in The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, Public Opinion Quarterly, and many others. He is currently the co-editor of the Chicago Studies in American Politics book series at the University of Chicago Press. He is also the recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Cheryl Boudreau is Associate professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of more than two dozen scientific research articles in outlets such as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly and many others). This research examines whether and when different types of political information help uninformed voters to make political decisions that improve their welfare. This information may come from trusted endorsers, encouraging citizens to vote for a particular candidate or initiative, or from politicians competing in a debate. Citizens may also rely on the statements their peers make during discussions, the opinions of the masses (as reflected in public opinion polls), or the detailed policy information contained in voter guides. Using laboratory and survey experiments, as well as observational studies, Boudreau's research sheds light on when these different types of information help uninformed voters to behave as though they are more informed.

Christopher Jan Carman is the Stevenson Professor of Citizenship at the University of Glasgow, having served as the Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences and Dean of the Glasgow-Nankai Joint Graduate School. He is the co-author (With David C. Barker) of Representing Red and Blue: How the Culture Wars Change the Way Citizens Speak and Politicians Listen (OUP, 2012) and More Scottish than British? The 2011 Scottish Parliament Election (Routledge, 2014) as well as other academic books and journal publications. He is a member of the Scottish Election Studies team, having previously served as the series PI. He has also consulted extensively for the Scottish Parliament, conducting research and drafting several reports on the parliament's public petitions system and citizen engagement. His research has been supported by several grants from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. He is currently the lead academic in the John Smith Centre for Public Service and coordinates the activities of the Stevenson Trust for Citizenship.

Logan Dancey is an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. His work on public opinion and congressional behavior has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research and Congress & the Presidency. His research focuses primarily on how legislators seek to represent their constituents in more polarized times and the ways in which the public responds to partisanship inside Congress. He is also the recipient of a 2017-18 Negotiating Agreements in Congress Research Grant through the Social Science Research Council's Anxieties of Democracy Program.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America. He is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015) and winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy." He writes regularly for , a Vox blog. He is currently writing a book on the ways in which American political institutions are driving American political divisions.

Kim Fridkin is a Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. She has authored or co-authored four books, including The Changing Face of Representation: The Gender of U.S. Senators and Constituent Communications (University of Michigan, 2014), No Holds Barred: Negative Campaigning in the U.S. Senate (Prentice Hall, Inc., 2004), The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 1999), and The Political Consequences of Being a Woman (Columbia University Press, 1996). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. She is the Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies Experimental Laboratory at Arizona State University. Her research interests include political communication, women and politics, and senate elections.

Cary Funk is director of science and society research at Pew Research Center. She is a co-author of and and . She is a survey researcher with broad expertise in political and social attitudes, but has been specializing in public understanding of science topics since 2001. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she directed the VCU Life Sciences Surveys, national surveys on science and biotechnology. She is currently on the editorial board of the Bulletin of Science and Technology & Society. Funk began her career at CBS News in New York, where she worked on pre-election surveys and exit polls; in more recent years, she served as an election night analyst for NBC News. She was on the political science faculty at Rice University and at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) before joining Pew Research Center. Funk has published numerous academic articles and book chapters in the fields of political science, public opinion and political behavior and is a co-author of and and .

Alan Gerber is the Dean of the Social Science Division of the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Political Science, Faculty in Residence at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and director of the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University. His current research focuses on the application of experimental methods to the study of campaign communications, and he has designed and performed experimental evaluations of many political communications programs, both partisan and non-partisan in nature. His academic honors and awards include the Best Book Award from the APSA Organized Section on Experimental Research (2013) and the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2002), and he was recently selected to be a Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology (elected 2016). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (2011), and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (2004-2005). He has served as president of the APSA Organized Section on Experimental Research as well the chair of the APSA Organized Section on Experimental Research Reporting Standards Committee. Professor Gerber is also a Faculty Research Associate in Political Economy at NBER and a Faculty Affiliate at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab-North America.

Justin H. Gross is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he also serves as a core faculty member of the Computational Social Science Institute. He specializes in the study of American ideologies, opinion media (traditional and social), value framing of public policy issues, and the application of network and text analysis to questions in political communication and legislative decision-making. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Social Networks, and PS: Political Science and Politics, as well as chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Political Networks, Latinos and the 2012 Election, and Latino America. His blog posts on topics ranging from probabilistic misinterpretations of polls, negative campaigning on Twitter, and Latino public opinion have appeared in the Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog and the Huffington Post, as well as at Latino Decisions, where he has served as senior statistician and analyst for several years.

Donald Haider-Markel is Professor and Chair of political science at the University of Kansas. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 refereed articles, over a dozen book chapters, and several books in a range of issue areas, including civil rights, race and inequality, religion and the culture wars, criminal justice policy, terrorism and counterterrorism, and environmental policy. His articles have appeared many journals, including The Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, Legislative Studies Quarterly and many others. His books include Out and Running: Gay and Lesbian Candidates, Elections, and Policy Representation (Georgetown University Press) Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing, and Policy Adoption (University of Michigan Press), The Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government (Oxford University Press), and Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (University of Chicago Press). He has been recipient or co-recipient of grants from the EPA STAR program, the National Science Foundation, and the American Psychological Foundation.

Danny Hayes is Associate professor of political science at George Washington University. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin and previously served on the faculty at American University and Syracuse University. A former journalist, his teaching and research focuses on political communication and political behavior in American politics. He is the co-author of two books: Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Influence from Abroad: Foreign Voices, the Media, and U.S. Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press, 2013). His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and Politics & Gender, among other outlets. He is an associate editor of the Washington Post political science blog The Monkey Cage. In 2014, 2015, and 2016, he was named the university's best professor by GW's student newspaper, The Hatchet.

Jennifer Hochschild is Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard College Professor, and the Chair of the Department of Government. She holds lectureships in the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2011, she held the John W. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. She was President of the in 2015-2016. Hochschild is currently conducting research on the politics and ideology of genomic science, immigrant political incorporation, and citizens' use of factual information in political decision-making. Hochschild is the author or co-author of numerous books, including most recently, , co-authored with Katherine Levine Einstein (Oklahoma University Press, 2015), , co-authored with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch (Princeton University Press, 2012), and , co-edited with John Mollenkopf (Cornell University Press, 2009). She is also the author of The American Dream and the Public Schools, co-authored with Nathan Scovronick (Oxford University Press, 2003), and other books. Hochschild was founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and was a former co-editor of the American Political Science Review (2010-2012). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former member and vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation. She has received fellowships or awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, Spencer Foundation, American Political Science Association, Princeton University Research Board, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Mellon Foundation, Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and Harvard's Center for American Political Studies.

Gregory Huber is Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of American Politics, Resident Fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Associate Editor of Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Huber's research focuses on American Politics and is motivated by a desire to understand how individuals think about the government, how these attitudes are shaped by government action and political campaigns, and how those beliefs in turn shape citizens' political activities and government policy. He draws on multiple methodologies, including field interviews, formal modeling, survey and administrative records analysis, and field, lab, and quasi-experiments. He is the author of the book The Craft of Bureaucratic Neutrality (Cambridge, 2007) and over fifty peer-reviewed articles. Huber has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most recently a National Science Foundation grant on the topic of how individuals assess legitimate authority.

Jennifer Jerit is Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University. She studies public opinion and political communication, with a focus on the features of news coverage that influence whether people do (or do not) learn about politics. In other work, she has examined the persuasive effects of political rhetoric and several of her current projects investigate best practices for the measurement of public opinion through survey and experimental methods. Jerit has authored more than two dozen research articles in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior. Prior to arriving at Stony Brook, she was a faculty member at Florida State University and a research fellow at the Roper Center for Public Opinion (University of Connecticut). She has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and various honors such as the Erik Erikson Early Career Award for Excellence and Creativity in the field of Political Psychology.

Julia Kamin is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, currently dissertating in NYC where she participates in NYU's Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab. Her dissertation work questions social media's ability to amplify "information polarization" either by calcifying information bubbles or by propagating extreme news stories and memes. Using agent based modeling as well as experimental work and big data analysis to examine both network-level and user-level processes that contribute to information polarization, Julia finds that while social media lends itself to the proliferation of extreme information, its capacity to reinforce our information bubbles may be overstated.

Jennifer Kavanagh is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation and associate director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program in RAND's Arroyo Center. Her research focuses on U.S. political institutions and public opinion and their implications for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. She also studies defense strategy and planning, military force posture, and U.S. military interventions. Her recent book, co-authored with RAND's CEO Michael Rich, defines "Truth Decay" as the diminishing reliance on facts and data in U.S. political and civil discourse and describes its causes and consequences. Kavanagh is also a faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and has taught research methods courses as an adjunct professor at Georgetown and American University. While completing her Ph.D., she was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow and completed a research internship at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Kavanagh graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Government and a minor in the Russian language.

Kabir Khanna is a political scientist and currently manager of elections at CBS News. Kabir studies political psychology, public opinion, and methodology, with a focus on partisan polarization. He is currently examining partisan bias in factual knowledge and its consequences among the American public. He has published articles in Political Analysis, Political Behavior, and Quarterly Journal of Political Science. He has also developed software that can be used to predict the race/ethnicity of individuals in analyses of voter files. He joined CBS News in the fall of 2016, where he conducts polling, data analysis, and election projections at the CBS Decision Desk.

Scott Keeter is a senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center. In this role, Keeter provides methodological guidance to all of Pew Research Center's research areas. An expert on American public opinion and political behavior, he is co-author of four books, including A New Engagement? Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (Oxford University Press), The Diminishing Divide: Religion's Changing Role in American Politics (Brookings Institution Press), What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (Yale University Press), and Uninformed Choice: The Failure of the New Presidential Nominating System (Praeger). His other published research includes articles and book chapters on , political communications and behavior, and topics. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, he taught at George Mason University, Rutgers University and Virginia Commonwealth University, where he also directed a survey research center. He is a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and has been an election night analyst of exit polls for NBC News since 1980. In 2016, Keeter won the American Association for Public Opinion Research's highest honor, the , for "outstanding contribution to the field of public opinion research."

Jonathan Ladd is Associate Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Department of Government at Georgetown Universit and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is on the editorial boards of Political Behavior and American Politics Research, an associate editor of Research & Politics and a writer for Vox's political science blog Mischiefs of Faction. He mainly studies and writes about public opinion, partisan polarization and the news media. His book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, won the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy as well as the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research. His articles have also appeared in political science journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior and Political Psychology.

Jennifer Lawless is Professor of Government and Director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University. Her research focuses on political ambition, and she is the author of Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era (with Danny Hayes), Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics (with Richard L. Fox) Becoming a Candidate: Political Ambition and the Decision to Run for Office, and It Still Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office (with Richard L. Fox). Her research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, has appeared in numerous academic journals. In addition, she has issued several policy reports on the barriers that impede women's candidate emergence.

Nathan Lee is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University. His dissertation research focuses on misinformation and the politicization of science and expertise in contemporary American politics. He is also Founder and Director of the National Survey on Local Government (nslg.org), a research initiative which aims to facilitate high-impact, applied political science research through a novel time-sharing survey panel with local and state elected officials from around the country. Previously, he worked at the White House National Economic Council and the Department of Energy's Climate Change Policy Office.

Charles Lewis is a national investigative journalist, a former ABC News and CBS News 60 Minutes producer, a best-selling author or co-author of six books and the founder of two Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Named as "one of the most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I" by the Encyclopedia of Journalism (2009), he has been a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. A MacArthur Fellow and past winner of the PEN USA First Amendment Award, he is the founding executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and a tenured professor at American University in Washington. His most recent book is 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity (2014).

Arthur Lupia is the Hal R Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He examines how people make decisions when they lack information and in how they manage complex information flows. He has held a range of scientific leadership positions including Principal Investigator of the American National Election Studies. As a founder of TESS (Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences), he has helped hundreds of scientists from many disciplines run innovative experiments on opinion formation and change using nationally representative subject pools. He helped to design the EITM Summer Institutes and currently serves as its lead PI. He currently serves Chair of the National Academy of Science's Roundtable of the Application of Social and Behavioral Science Research, is an executive member of the Board of Directors of Climate Central and is on the Advisory Board of the National Academies' Division of Behavioral and Social Science and Education. He is past Chair of the Division of Social. Economic, and Political Sciences at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also received multiple honors including the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award from the American Political Science Association, and National Academy of Sciences' Award for Initiatives in Research. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is one of the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows. He is the author of several dozen per-reviewed research articles in outlets such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly and many others. He is also the author of several award-winning books. His newest book is Uninformed: Why People Know So Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It (Oxford University Press 2015).

Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He studies the psychology of politics and writes about the political consequences of belief. He is the author many academic research articles and four books: The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence (Baylor University Press), A Citizen's Guide to American Ideology (Routledge), A Citizen's Guide to the Constitution and the Supreme Court (Routledge), and One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (with David C. Barker; Oxford University Press).

Lilliana Mason is assistant professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press). Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior and many others. Mason received the 2017 Emerging Scholar Award from the Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Ericka Menchen-Trevino is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at American University. She has developed software to integrate the collection of web browsing trace data with other social science methods. She is writing a book called "Researching Digital Traces" that advances a methodological approach to guide the technical and ethical development of trace data research. She applies these methods to study the intersection of political communication and digital media, specifically, selective exposure to political communication.

Joanne Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and Affiliate Associate Professor of Psychology and the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her work, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, centers on the psychological underpinnings of political attitudes and mass behavior. She is the recipient of three best paper awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for the best paper delivered on a Political Communication panel (for her paper titled "Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust"). She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, and Public Opinion Quarterly. Her most recent research, on the antecedents of conspiracy beliefs, has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and National Public Radio.

Diana C. Mutz is Professor and Samuel A. Stouffer Chair in Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also serves as Director of the . In 2011, she received the Lifetime Career Achievement Award in Political Communication from the American Political Science Association. She was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. Mutz has published articles in a variety of academic journals including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics and Journal of Communication. She is also the author of Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a book awarded the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association, and the 2004 Doris Graber Prize for Most Influential Book on Political Communication published in the last ten years. In 2006, she published Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2006) which was awarded the 2007 Goldsmith Prize by Harvard University and the Robert Lane Prize for the Best Book in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association. Mutz served as founding co-PI of Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), an interdisciplinary infrastructure project that continues to promote methodological innovation across the social sciences (see ). For this, Mutz and co-PI Skip Lupia received the Warren Mitofsky Innovators Award in 2007. She subsequently wrote Population-Based Survey Experiments (Princeton University Press, 2011) which offers the first book-length treatment of this new method drawing examples from across the social sciences. In 2014, Mutz and co-author Seth Goldman published The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes (Russell Sage Foundation), which won the Frank Luther Mott - Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism & Mass Communication Research Award. Mutz's latest book, In-Your-Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015.

Kim L. Nalder is Professor of Political Science at California State University, Sacramento. She teaches Media and Politics, Political Psychology, Public Opinion, and Political Behavior. Professor Nalder serves as Executive Director of CalSPEAKS Opinion Research, a multi-panel polling organization at the Institute for Social Research. She also directs a non-partisan voter information organization, the Project for an Informed Electorate. She's most recently the author of "Navigating the Post-Fact Era" and "Trust, Misinformation, Press Legitimacy and Democracy" with globalyceum.com. Over many election seasons, she has collaborated with Sacramento KCRA News (NBC Affiliate) and Capital Public Radio (NPR) to fact check campaign advertisements. She is a frequent political commentator and has been interviewed by CNN, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. Prof. Nalder's research has been featured on Vox.com, the Economist, Wired, and the London School of Economics US Politics Blog.

Brendan Nyhan is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His research, which focuses on misperceptions about politics and health care, has been published in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Pediatrics, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, and Vaccine. He is a contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times (March 2014-) and a co-founder of Bright Line Watch (January 2017-). I previously served as a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review (November 2011-February 2014). From 2001-2004, he co- edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon (2002) and the Philadelphia Inquirer (2004). In 2004, he published All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller that Amazon.com named one of the ten best political books of the year.

Ethan Porter is an assistant professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2016. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Political Communication, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior and Journal of Experimental Political Science. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other popular publications, and has received grant support from the National Science Foundation and the Omidyar Network. His book manuscript, The Consumer Citizen, investigates the ways in which everyday consumer decision-making affects political attitudes and behavior.

Justin Reedy is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and a research associate in the Center for Risk & Crisis Management at the University of Oklahoma. He studies political communication and deliberation, mass and digital media, and group communication. In particular, his research focuses on how groups of people make political and civic decisions in face-to-face and online settings; how public opinion on political, scientific, and technical issues is formed; and how people and policy makers can come together to deliberate and make better decisions on public policy issues that involve significant societal and personal risk.

Brad Rourke is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation and Executive Editor of the National Issues Forums issue guides as well as other issue books produced for public deliberation. His work includes studies of naming and framing issues in public terms and how people make decisions and work together on shared challenges in communities. Prior to joining the foundation, Rourke was president of the Mannakee Circle Group, director of external initiatives at The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, and vice president for public policy at the Institute for Global Ethics.

Robert Y. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He is also former study director at the National Opinion Research Center (University of Chicago). He is co-author of The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (with Benjamin Page, University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (with Lawrence Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2000). His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion (with Brigitte L. Nacos and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, University of Chicago Press, 2011). He is also coauthor or coeditor of several other books and has published numerous articles in major academic journals. Shapiro served for many years as editor of Public Opinion Quarterly's "The Polls-Trends" section, and is currently chair of the journal's Advisory Committee. He also serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Hwayong Shin is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Michigan. Her research sits at the intersection of political communication and political psychology. Drawing on her methodological interests in surveys and experiments, she is currently working on a project exploring the emotional roots of distrust across partisan lines. Her dissertation research expands on this by exploring when fact checking reduces misinformation as well as when it promotes communication across party lines.

John Sides is Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. His current research focuses on American elections, the politics of U.S. fiscal policy, and the influence of factual information on public opinion. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Politics Research, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Communication, Political Studies, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Research and Politics, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. He helped found and contributes to , a site about politics and political science that is now part of the Washington Post.

Emily Thorson is Assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University. Previously, she was an assistant professor at Boston College and George Washington University. Emily's research traces how political information and misinformation reaches citizens (through traditional and new forms of media) and how this information shapes their attitudes and behavior. She has published articles in Political Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Communication Research. She is the co-editor of Misinformation and Mass Audiences (forthcoming from the University of Texas press) and is currently working on a book called The Invented State: Systematic Policy Misperceptions in the American Public.

Benjamin Toff is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota where he studies changing journalistic practices and audience behaviors in the contemporary political communications environment. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Blind Scorekeepers: How Public Opinion Gets Defined in American Politics, which examines the role played by quantitative survey data in news coverage of American politics. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA in social studies from Harvard. From 2016-2017, he was also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Prior to entering academia, he worked for several years as a journalist and researcher at The New York Times.

Joseph E. Uscinski is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami College of Arts & Sciences, where he teaches courses on public opinion, conspiracy theories, and mass media. Dr. Uscinski has published two books, American Conspiracy Theories with Joseph M. Parent (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism (New York University Press 2014) as well as twenty-three peer-reviewed studies in social science journals. His essays have appeared in the The Washington Post, The LA Times, Newsweek, Eurozine, and Reason Magazine among many others.

Amanda L. Wintersieck is a UC Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her research interests lie in political behavior and political communication. Specifically, she is interested in the effects of political campaigns on voters' evaluations of candidates, on the role the media plays in citizen's vote choice, and the conditions that advantage a candidate's campaign. Her current research focuses on the role of news media and the impact of the electoral context in political campaigns. She pursues these interests utilizing a multi-methodological approach, including experiments, surveys, and content analysis. Her work has appeared in the Political Communication, American Politics Research, The Praeger Handbook of Political Campaigning in the United States, the , and .

Sara Yeganeh is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at Stony Brook University. Her work is rooted in the subfields of political communication, legislative politics and social psychology. She has a strong interest in political methodology where she utilizes machine learning, text mining, social network analysis, among other techniques to further explore these research areas. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the impact of outside groups, particularly campaign contributors, on legislative action.

Confirmed Press/Practitioner Participants

Molly Ball is National Political Correspondent for Time. Formerly, she was a national politics writer for The Atlantic, where she covers national politics. She was awarded the 2012 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting for her presidential campaign coverage. She has also written for Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Las Vegas Sun. In 2007, she won $100,000 on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

Robert Costa is a national political reporter at The Washington Post, where he covers Congress and the White House, and Moderator of Washington Week, the Peabody Award-winning weekly news analysis series on PBS. Prior to joining The Washington Post, Costa was a reporter and then Washington Editor for National Review. Costa is also a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Costa earned a Master's degree in 2009 from the University of Cambridge and a Bachelor's degree in 2008 from the University of Notre Dame, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees.

EJ Dionne is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and university professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University. A nationally known and respected commentator on politics, Dionne appears weekly on National Public Radio and regularly on MSNBC. Dionne began his career with The New York Times. His best-selling book, Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1991) won the Los Angeles Times book prize. He is the author or editor of several other books and volumes, most recently Why the Right Went Wrong (Simon & Schuster, 2016) and, with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, One Nation After Trump (St. Martin's Press, 2017). Dionne has received numerous awards, including the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award to honor a major journalistic contribution to the understanding of politics. He has been named among the 25 most influential Washington journalists by the National Journal and among the capital city's top 50 journalists by the Washingtonian magazine. He was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael J. Gerson is a nationally syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post and in more than 100 other newspapers. He is the author of Heroic Conservatism (HarperOne, 2007) and coauthor of City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Moody, 2010). He appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour, Face the Nation and other programs. Gerson serves as a Fellow at ONE, a bipartisan advocacy organization dedicated to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable diseases. Until 2006, Gerson was a top aide to President George W. Bush as Assistant to the President for Policy and Strategic Planning, where he was a key administration advocate for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), the fight against global sex trafficking and funding for women's justice and empowerment issues. Prior to that appointment, he served in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President, Director of Presidential Speechwriting, Assistant to the President for Speechwriting and Policy Advisor.

Mike McCurry is Director of the Center for Public Theology and a Distinguished Professor of Public Theology at the Wesley Theological Seminary in the nation's capital. McCurry has nearly four decades of experience in Washington. McCurry served in the White House as Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton (1995-1998). He also served as Spokesman for the U.S. Department of State (1993-1995) and Director of Communications for the Democratic National Committee (1988-1990). McCurry held a variety of leadership roles in national campaigns for the Democratic ticket from 1984 to 2004 and worked as a Press Secretary in the United States Senate from 1976 to 1983, serving Senators Harrison A. Williams, Jr. (D-NJ) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). In 2000, McCurry joined the Board of Governors of the Wesley Theological Seminary and served two terms while also completing a graduate degree. McCurry serves on numerous boards or advisory councils including Share Our Strength, the Children's Scholarship Fund, the White House Historical Association, and the Global Health Initiative of the United Methodist Church. He is a member and former Co-Chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which organizes the fall general election debates between the major candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. McCurry is also of counsel at the Washington, DC public affairs and communications consulting firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc.

Shawna Thomas is the Washington, DC Bureau Chief for Vice News, managing Vice News' politics and DC-based policy coverage and appearing on HBO's Vice News Tonight. Prior to joining Vice News, Thomas served as the senior producer and senior digital editor of NBC News' "Meet the Press." and, before that, she covered the White House and Capitol Hill for NBC News. Her reporting earned her an Emmy and multiple Emmy nominations. Thomas studied political communication at The George Washington University and earned her Master's degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Southern California.