Scott Althaus

Scott Althaus is Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also has faculty appointments with the School of Information Sciences and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work with the Cline Center applies text analytics methods and machine learning algorithms to extract insights from millions of news stories in ways that produce new forms of knowledge that advance societal well-being around the world. His own research interests explore the communication processes that support political accountability in democratic societies and that empower political discontent in non-democratic societies. His research examines 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. He is co-author (with Daron Shaw and Costas Panagopolous) of Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, August 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. Other 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.