Chris Tausanovitch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He studies the relationship between constituency opinion and the actions of elected officials in the United States. His book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy (with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck) coined the term “calcification” to describe the combination of entrenched partisanship and closely contested elections that characterizes today’s polarized politics.
Tausanovitch is Co-Principal Investigator (with Lynn Vavreck) of Nationscape, a project that surveyed 500,000 Americans during the 2020 election cycle. He is also the Co-Principal Investigator (with Christopher Warshaw) of the American Ideology Project, a project that produces estimates of the average political ideology of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, county and medium-sized city in the United States. Data from Nationscape and the American Ideology Project have been made freely available to the research community, and his related publication have been cited in over 1,000 scholarly books and articles.
His work has appeared in The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among many other outlets. His research has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Houston Chronicle, The Economist, Forbes, Vox, and USA Today, among others, and he has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Professor Tausanovitch received his PhD from Stanford University in 2013. In 2012 he worked for the Senate Finance Committee as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He is a recipient of the UCLA Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Center for American Politics and Public Policy Kenneth L. Sokoloff Fellowship. He is a member of the 2024 cohort of Andrew Carnegie Fellows.
ctausanovitch[at]ucla.edu