I am a Democratic Innovations Postdoctoral Associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies working with Alan Gerber and Greg Huber., where I have coordinated Yale’s contributions to the SAY24 presidential election study. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of California San Diego in 2023 studying elections and voters.

My research investigates public opinion and representation. I am an expert in using surveys and administrative data to understand behaviour, especially in the context of American elections where I have looked at how voters constrain (or fail to constrain) legislators to induce representation. I am broadly interested in how to measure public opinion, how meaningful attitudes are, and what the relationship between policy preferences, candidate positions, and vote choice is.

I have also studied how to increase voter turnout using large scale field experiments, how COVID-19 helped to polarize the vote-by-mail debate in the United States, and how election officials can increase trust in elections in the US. I also look at aggregate results, such as racial gaps in representation in the US Congress and the dynamics of campaign contributions in US elections.

My research has appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Legislative Studies Quarterly, the British Journal of Political Science and Political Analysis, in addition to R&Rs at the APSR and AJPS. It has also been quoted or discussed in Slate, Forbes, and the LA Times, as well as recieving multiple APSA section awards.

You can find my CV here or email me at mackenzie [dot] lockhart [at] yale [dot] edu.