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Our Staff

  • Bryan D. Jones
    Director

    Professor Jones is the J. J. "Jake" Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.  His research interests center in the study of public policy processes, American governing institutions, and the connection between human decision-making and organizational behavior.

    Jones directs the Policy Agendas Project, now housed at the University of Texas with Frank Baumgartner of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and John Wilkerson of the University of Washington, 

    Jones has received National Science Foundation Grants totaling more than $2,650,000, and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, Policy Studies Journal, and many other professional journals. He has served as Vice President of the Midwest Political Science Association and he served as President of that association for 2010-2011. Jones won the Herbert A. Simon Award for Contributions to the Study of Public Administration in 2003.

    Jones’ books include Politics and the Architecture of Choice (2001) and Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics (1994), both winners of the APSA Political Psychology Section Robert Lane Award; The Politics of Attention (co-authored with Frank Baumgartner, 2005); Agendas and Instability in American Politics (co-authored with Frank Baumgartner, 1993), winner of the 2001 Aaron Wildavsky Award for Enduring Contribution to the Study of Public Policy of the American Political Science Association’s Public Policy Section; and, most recently, The Politics of Bad Ideas (co-authored with Walt Williams, 2007).

    http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/government/faculty/bj3276

  • Frank R. Baumgartner
    Co-Director

    Frank Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

    Baumgartner created the Policy Agendas Project with Bryan D. Jones, and they continue to co-direct it with John Wilkerson. Books from that project include Comparative Studies of Policy Agendas, a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy (13,7, September 2006; co-edited with Bryan D. Jones and Christoffer Green-Pedersen); The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (with Bryan D. Jones; University of Chicago Press, 2005); Policy Dynamics (co-edited, with Bryan D. Jones; University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Agendas and Instability in American Politics (with Bryan Jones; University of Chicago Press, 1993; second edition 2009).

    Other books include Basic Interests (with Beth Leech; Princeton University Press, 1998) and Conflict and Rhetoric in French Policymaking (Pittsburgh, 1989).  Baumgartner’s 2008 book, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (with Suzanna De Boef and Amber E. Boydstun; Cambridge University Press was awarded the Gladys M. Kammerer Award by the American Political Science Association for the best book on US national policy. In 2009, the University of Chicago Press published Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (with Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball, and Beth L. Leech).

    His current research projects focus on extensions of the Policy Agendas Project (internationally in Europe, for the state of Pennsylvania, and adding more resources to the US project) as well as European extensions of the Lobbying and Advocacy Project. He is also involved in various projects relating to the use of the death penalty in North Carolina and elsewhere, particularly issues of racial bias, cost, and innocence. Further projects relate to issue-framing more generally, with a particular emphasis on which issues in American politics are linked in the media to discussions of race and gender.

  • John Wilkerson
    Co-Director

    Professor Wilkerson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington.  His research focuses primarily on legislative policymaking. More specifically, he studies how legislatures manage issues and how legislative processes differ depending on the type of issue at stake. 

    He is a principal investigator of several long term projects: The Congressional Bills Project, the Policy Agendas Project, and the Comparative Agendas Project. Each of these projects develops (and makes available to the research community) reliable indicators of issue attention across multiple policymaking venues over long periods of time. He also has a longstanding interest in the benefits of information technology developments for research and instruction.

    He teaches American Politics, Legislative Politics, State Politics and Game Theory for Political Scientists.

    http://www.polisci.washington.edu/Directory/Faculty/Faculty/faculty_wilkerson.html

  • Samuel Workman
    Faculty Associate

    Samuel Workman is an Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.  His research interests center on the bureaucracy, congressional-bureaucratic interactions, and the role of public administration in policy making. His current projects examine the role of bureaucracy in agenda setting in the administrative state, congresssional attention to bureaucracy, and how policy makers and bureaucrats cope with and interact under uncertainty in policy making. He is currently finishing a manuscript tentatively titled Economizing Attention: Agenda Setting and the Influence of Bureaucracy in American Politics. A separate project, "Attention, Politics, or Performance? Explaining Congressional Attention to the Bureaucracy", examines sources of variation in congressional attention to federal agencies and programs over time. Professor Workman’s teaching encompasses American politics, public policy, political institutions, and statistical methodology.

  • Trey Thomas
    Project Director

    Trey comes to UT-Austin from Penn State, where he completed a B.A. in Political Science, a B.Phil. in Information Studies, and an M.A. in Political Science.  He is currently working on projects that explore cue-taking behavior in Congress, the network structure of D.C. lobbying, attention dynamics across media sources during the 2008 Presidential election, and the relationship between the stock market and Congressional hearings.

  • Michelle Wolfe
    Graduate Research Fellow (Former Project Director)

    Michelle is a graduate student in the Department of Government and is the current Project Director for the Policy Agendas Project.  Her research interests include the media and agenda-setting.

  • JoBeth Surface Shafran
    Graduate Research Fellow

    JoBeth comes to UT-Austin from West Virginia University.  She is a third year graduate student in the Department of Government and is a Policy Agendas Project Fellow.

  • Jonathan Lewallen
    Graduate Research Fellow

    Jonathan is a UT-Austin graduate student studying the U.S. Congress and its role in the policy process, particularly the agenda-setting roles of congressional committees, leaders and procedures. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, followed by employment with the U.S. Senate,Congressional Quarterly and the Texas House of Representatives.

  • Michelle Whyman
    Graduate Research Fellow

    Michelle comes to UT-Austin from the University of Washington, where she completed a B.A. in Political Science and a B.A. in Philosophy. She is a second year graduate student in the Department of Government, and her research interests include American political institutions, public policy and interbranch relations, with an emphasis on the role of the Supreme Court. As a Policy Agendas Project Fellow, Michelle manages several of the project’s datasets and assists with the undergraduate fellows program.