Nick Judd
Postdoc, University of Chicago
Nick Judd is a Social Sciences Teaching Fellow in the Department of Sociology and the College at The University of Chicago. His research focuses on the social structure of political action. He also actively maintains open-source software that is widely used by scholars of American politics.
Nick’s current research adjudicates between competing theories of party structure and develops new theory about the relationships between political elites and their supporters. Using data on campaign finance records in U.S. federal elections, he presents new evidence about the activity of sub-party coalitions, or fractions. He demonstrates effects of fractional politics on outcomes in elections and policymaking. In contrast to theoretical frameworks that theorize a party is controlled by a single, national party elite, his results show that major parties comprise multiple fractions. These fractions gain or lose power through many smaller, local conflicts. In another project, he studies the interactions between news professionals and political elites on social media. A third project explores social inequalities in access to political representation.
Email | CV | Personal Website
Research Interests
Political sociology, media sociology, social movements, computational social science, quantitative methods, American politics, and political communication.
Select Works
Martin, John Levi and Nick Judd. 2020. “Tasks of the Political Sociology of the Next Ten Years.” In The New Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by Thomas Janoski, Cedric de Leon, Joya Misra and Isaac Martin. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Messing, Solomon, Patrick VanKessel, Adam Hughes, Nick Judd, Rachel Blum and Brian Broderick. February 2017. “Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach.” Pew Research Center.