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The Communication Department at Stanford University is home to leading scholars who study how communication and media affect political attitudes and behaviors, and what communication reveals about political institutions and systems [source: stanford-political-comm]. This area is known for its innovation in research methods and focus on scientific inference [source: stanford-political-comm].
Several research labs and centers operate within this area. James Fishkin directs the Deliberative Democracy Lab, which is devoted to research and applications of Deliberative Polling, a method of public consultation for engaging representative and informed opinion on policy issues, and has collaborated on projects in more than 24 countries [source: stanford-political-comm]. James Hamilton directs the Journalism Program, with research focusing on the economics of news, including the effects of market failures on reporting, the relationship between income and information, and computational journalism [source: stanford-political-comm]. Shanto Iyengar directs the Political Communication Laboratory, which focuses on the role of mass media in democratic societies and uses experimental methods to measure the causal effects of news media and mass communication on political opinion and behavior [source: stanford-political-comm].
Additional research groups include the Political Psychology Research Group, directed by Jon Krosnick, which focuses on the effects of political communication on attitude formation, change, and impact, and on optimizing methods of survey research to study political cognition and action [source: stanford-political-comm]. Jennifer Pan’s research focuses on revealing the political choices and outcomes of non-democratic societies through their patterns of communication and information control using computational and experimental methods [source: stanford-political-comm].
The program has produced many graduates who have gone on to academic and industry positions. These include Yingdan Lu (Ph.D. 2023), now an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University; Adina Abeles (Ph.D. 2020), a Quantitative Social Scientist at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; and Diana Mutz (Ph.D. 1988), the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania [source: stanford-political-comm]. Other notable graduates include Vincent Price (Ph.D. 1987), who is President of Duke University, and Markus Prior (Ph.D. 2003), an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University [source: stanford-political-comm].
Use it for
A campaigner can use this source to understand the academic foundations of political communication research, particularly how media and communication shape political attitudes and behaviors [source: stanford-political-comm]. The research methods and findings from Stanford’s labs—such as Deliberative Polling for engaging representative opinion, experimental methods for measuring media effects, and computational approaches to studying information control—offer evidence-based tools for designing campaign strategies, testing messages, and understanding public opinion [source: stanford-political-comm].