Professor Scott Althaus
Who We Are
Professor Scott Althaus
Professor Althaus joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1996 with a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Communication. He is currently the Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. He is also a faculty affiliate of the School of Information Sciences, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, and the Illinois Informatics Institute.
Most recently, he is co-author of Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2024), a project that was supported in part by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research.
Professor Althaus’s research and teaching interests explore the communication processes that support political accountability and that empower discontent in both democratic and non-democratic societies. His research explores how professional journalists construct news about public affairs in an increasingly hybridized communication ecosystem, how leaders shape professionally-produced news coverage for political advantage, how citizens use professionally-produced news coverage to make sense of public affairs, and how citizens convey their preferences to leaders through collective behaviors such as voting and acts of civil unrest. He has particular interests in popular support for war, data science methods for extreme-scale analysis of news coverage, cross-national comparative research on political communication, the psychology of information processing, and communication concepts in democratic theory. His current projects include using data mining methods to help journalists cover terrorist attacks in responsible ways, a book manuscript to be published by Cambridge University Press about the dynamics of popular support for war in the United States, and documenting police uses of lethal force in the United States with the Cline Center's SPOTLITE project.
He is co-author (with Daron Shaw and Costas Panagopolous) of the book Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2024) which draws on internal campaign records and novel data sources covering every presidential election from 1952 through 2020 to identify the Electoral College strategies for every major presidential campaign in the modern era, assess how well they executed their plans, and illuminate what difference their state-by-state allocation of candidate visits and television spending made on election day. His next most recent book, Building Theory in Political Communication: The Politics-Media-Politics Approach (co-authored with Gadi Wolfsfeld and Tamir Sheafer, Oxford University Press, 2022) developed a theoretical framework for understanding the role of communication media in supporting governmental accountability and increasing the government’s responsiveness to citizen needs that can be used to understand political communication processes in a variety of regime types around the world. It was recently honored with the 2023 Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award by the International Journal of Press/Politics. His earlier book on the political uses of opinion surveys in democratic societies, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003), was awarded a 2004 Goldsmith Book Prize by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and a 2004 David Easton Book Prize by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. He was named 2014-15 Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, a 2004-5 Beckman Associate by the UIUC Center for Advanced Studies, and a 2003-4 Helen Corley Petit Scholar by the UIUC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was honored with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and his undergraduate and graduate courses regularly appear on the university's "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students." Professor Althaus serves on the editorial boards of Political Communication and Public Opinion Quarterly, and his research has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals across several disciplines including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Communication Research, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, and Sociological Methodology.
His research and commentary have been featured in a wide range of national and international news organizations including television outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN; leading newspapers including The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch; news magazines such as Forbes, The Atlantic, American Prospect, New York Magazine, Newsweek, Time Magazine, US News & World Reports; as well as National Public Radio and online outlets including PolitiFact, Huffington Post, Politico, and Talking Points Memo.
Email: salthaus@illinois.edu
Primary Office: Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Illinois, 2001 South First Street, Suite 207, Champaign, IL, 61870-7461
Phone: (217) 265-7879
Secondary Office: 328E David Kinley Hall, 1407 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL , 61801
Books
Articles
van Atteveldt, Wouter, Scott Althaus, and Hartmut Wessler. 2021. “The Trouble with Sharing Your Privates: Pursuing Ethical Open Science and Collaborative Research across National Jurisdictions Using Sensitive Data.” Political Communication. 38(1-2): 192-98.
Chapters
Althaus, Scott, Joseph Bajjalieh, Jay Jennings, Michael Martin, Buddy Peyton, and Dan Shalmon. 2024. “It Was an Attempted Coup: The Cline Center’s Coup d’État Project Categorizes the January 6, 2021, Assault on the U.S. Capitol.” In Media and January 6th, edited by K. White, D. Kreiss, S. McGregor, and R. Tromble. New York: Oxford University Press.
Other
Althaus, Scott. 2005. “How Exceptional Was Turnout in 2004?” Political Communication Report 15(1).
Politics and the Media | PS 312 / CMN 325 / MS 322 | Course Syllabus
This upper-division undergraduate course examines the processes of mass-mediated political communication in democratic societies. Although these processes can be studied in a variety of contexts, this course will focus primarily on the interaction between news media, audiences, and strategic communicators in the United States. Special emphasis will be given to the role of news media in democratic theory; the politics of media control; the role of political communication in policymaking and in time of war; the impact of new mass communication technologies; the effects of media messages on audiences; and factors shaping the construction of news such as journalistic routines, media economics, and the strategic management of news by politicians.
Campaigning to Win | PS 411 / CMN 424 | Course Syllabus
This bridge course (for both upper-division undergraduates and graduate students) is a hands-on, “how it’s done” course that emphasizes the methods and tactics of modern political campaigns. This course uses a case study approach to illustrate the theories and concepts of persuasion, message targeting, and message delivery in the campaign context. The primary focus of these case studies will be on contemporary campaign practices in the United States, but we also examine important historical cases that illustrate successful and unsuccessful attempts at mass persuasion.
Junior Honors Seminar | PS 494 | Course Syllabus
This upper-division undergraduate honors course introduces students to the process of scientific research by engaging them in original academic research projects that have the potential to contribute to current public and scholarly debates. The topics of these projects change from course to course, but all of them offer immersion learning experiences that involve students in real-world social science research using the methods of quantitative content analysis.
Content Analysis Practicum | CMN 529 | Course Syllabus
The objectives of this graduate-level methods course on content analysis are threefold. First, to teach a generic and multipurpose method of quantitative content analysis that is commonly employed by scholars of mass communication and political communication to measure trends and discourse elements in news coverage. Second, to give students practical experience in all stages of quantitative content analysis, from protocol design to validity testing, reliability testing, coding, data entry, and data analysis. Third, to produce publishable research papers on the dynamics of public communication.
Political Communication | CMN 529 / PS 519 | Course Syllabus
This graduate course is an advanced introduction to theory and research in the field of political communication. Its goal is to acquaint students with the field’s history, research questions, theoretical approaches, empirical accomplishments, and likely future directions.
Public Opinion in the Public Sphere | CMN 529 / PS 519 | Course Syllabus
Although the discipline of political science is rooted in a normative concern for democracy, few empirically-minded political scientists have even a basic understanding or conceptual fluency for those aspects of democratic theory that provide a strong and coherent foundation for empirical work across the subfields. This weakness in the discipline is now a serious problem for our field. Democracy seems to be in crisis around the world, and political scientists can’t help the problem when they have simplistic or incoherent conceptions of what democracy is and what democratic rule is supposed to look like. This course is designed to fill this gap when it comes to understanding the nature and purpose of public opinion in democratic politics. It seeks to address what may be the central questions of democratic politics: What is public opinion, how do we know it when we see it, what is it supposed to do, and does it possess the characteristics that theories of democracy suggest it should? This is therefore a course designed to prepare students to become theoretically innovative public opinion researchers who possess a basic fluency in useful concepts from democratic theory that have yet to be fully recognized by or integrated into the cutting-edge debates within quantitative political science journals.