Faculty and Staff Profile

Will Horne

Educational Background

PhD Political Science
Princeton University 2022

Courses Taught

POSC 3410 Introduction to Quantitative Methods
POST 3710 European Politics
POSC 8410 Public Data Analysis (PhD)
POSC 8420 Quantitative Methods II (PhD)
POL 8820: Computational Text Analysis in Political Science (PhD Course) (at GSU)
POL 4900: Senior Seminar - Representation and Inequality in
Democratic Societies (at GSU)

Profile

I am an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Clemson University. I received my PhD from Princeton University in the Department of Politics in May of 2022, and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Executive Approval Project from 2022-2024.

Research Interests

My research focuses on changes in the structure of political competition and representation in advanced democratic societies. In particular I am interested in how political parties choose when and how to represent different groups in society, and how these decisions impact attitudes towards parties (including affective polarization), policy outputs and attitudes towards democracy. Methodologically, I have a particular interest in the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to study political parties and candidates.

My work has been published in the American Political Science Review , the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies and Public Opinion Quarterly, among other outlets. My research has been featured in The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage. I am also a core team member of the Executive Approval Project.

Research Publications

Gidron, Noam, Will Horne, Thomas Tichelbaecker and James Adams (Forthcoming, 2025), “Beyond observational relationships: Evidence from a ten-country experiment that policy disputes cause affective polarization”, British Journal of Political Science

Balogh, Timea, Will Horne, James Adams, Simon Weschle and Christopher Wlezien (2024), “Does Political Sophistication Moderate How Citizens Infer Left-Right Distances between Political Parties”, Journal of Elections, Parties and Public Opinion

Tichelbaecker, Thomas, Will Horne, Noam Gidron and James Adams (2024), “What do we measure when we measure affective polarization across countries?”, Public Opinion Quarterly

Horne, Will, James Adams and Noam Gidron (2023), “The Way we Were: How Histories of Co-Governance Alleviate Partisan Hostility.” Comparative Political Studies

Hudde, Ansgar, Will Horne, Noam Gidron and James Adams (2023), “How Warm Are Partisan Political Interactions? A Frequency-based Measure of Affective Fractionalization”, PLOS One

Adams, James, David Bracken, Noam Gidron, Will Horne, Diana O’Brien and Kaitlin Senk (2022), “Can’t We All Just Get Along? How Women MPs Can Ameliorate Affective Polarization in Western Publics,” American Political Science Review

Gidron, Noam, James Adams and Will Horne (2022), “Who Dislikes Whom: Affective Polarization between Pairs of Parties in Western Democracies”, British Journal of Political Science

Gidron, Noam, James Adams and Will Horne (2020), American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge University Press

Honors and Awards

GESIS Klingemann Prize for best paper using CSES data, European Political Science Association (2023)
Deil S. Wright Award for Best Paper in Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations, American Political Science Association (2019)
Kellog/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics, Midwest Political Science Association (2019)

Links