Professor of Political Science
Philip H. Alston, Jr. Distinguished Chair
Stephen P. Nicholson is the Philip H. Alston Jr. Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Georgia. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1998. His research interests include mass public behavior, public opinion, political psychology and direct democracy.
Dr. Nicholson is co-editor of Advances in Political Psychology, a journal of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). He also serves on the editorial boards of Political Behavior and Journal of Experimental Political Science. Currently, he is an Associate PI for Time Sharing Experiments in Social Sciences (TESS). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. He has also published in journals outside of political science, including Cognitive Science, Topics in Cognitive Science, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In addition to publishing numerous book chapters, Dr. Nicholson has a Princeton University Press book, Voting the Agenda: Candidates, Elections and Ballot Propositions, based on his award-winning dissertation.
His research has been recognized with two notable awards. In 1999, he won the American Political Science Association’s E.E. Schattschneider Award for the Best dissertation in American Politics, and in 2006 he was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for the American Political Science’s section on Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior. Dr. Nicholson has been awarded numerous grants for his research, including a grant from the National Science Foundation.
