Professor Scott Althaus
Who We Are
Professor Scott Althaus
Professor Althaus joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1996 with a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Communication. He is currently the Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. He is also a faculty affiliate of the School of Information Sciences, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, the Center for Social and Behavioral Science, and the Illinois Informatics Institute.
Professor Althaus’s research and teaching interests explore the communication processes that support political accountability in democratic societies and that empower political discontent in non-democratic societies. His interests focus on four areas of inquiry: (1) how journalists construct news coverage about public affairs, (2) how leaders attempt to shape news coverage for political advantage, (3) how citizens use news coverage for making sense of public affairs, and (4) how the opinions of citizens are communicated to leaders through collective preferences, such as the results of opinion polls, and through collective behaviors, such as 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. His current projects include using data mining methods to help journalists cover terrorist attacks in responsible ways, a solo-authored book manuscript to be published by Cambridge University Press about the dynamics of popular support for war in the United States, and a co-authored book manuscript (with Tamir Sheafer and Gadi Wolfsfeld) on understanding the role of media in supporting governmental accountability and increasing the government’s responsiveness to citizen needs.
Professor Althaus serves on the editorial boards of Critical Review, Political Communication, and Public Opinion Quarterly. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, and Sociological Methodology. His book on the political uses of opinion surveys in democratic societies, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) , was awarded a 2004 Goldsmith Book Prize by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and a 2004 David Easton Book Prize by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. He was named 2014-15 Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, a 2004-5 Beckman Associate by the UIUC Center for Advanced Studies, and a 2003-4 Helen Corley Petit Scholar by the UIUC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was honored with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and his undergraduate and graduate courses regularly appear on the university's "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students."
Email: salthaus@illinois.edu
Primary Office: Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Illinois, 2001 South First Street, Suite 207, Champaign, IL, 61870-7461
Phone: (217) 265-7879
Fax: (217) 265-7880
Secondary Office: 328E David Kinley Hall, 1407 West Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL , 61801
Articles
Chapters
Books
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Althaus, Scott. 2005. “How Exceptional Was Turnout in 2004?” Political Communication Report 15(1).
Politics and the Media | PS 312 / CMN 325 / MS 322 | Course Syllabus
This upper-division undergraduate course examines the processes of mass-mediated political communication in democratic societies. Although these processes can be studied in a variety of contexts, this course will focus primarily on the interaction between news media, audiences, and strategic communicators in the United States. Special emphasis will be given to the role of news media in democratic theory; the politics of media control; the role of political communication in policymaking and in time of war; the impact of new mass communication technologies; the effects of media messages on audiences; and factors shaping the construction of news such as journalistic routines, media economics, and the strategic management of news by politicians.
Campaigning to Win | PS 411 / CMN 424 | Course Syllabus
This bridge course (for both upper-division undergraduates and graduate students) is a hands-on, “how it’s done” course that emphasizes the methods and tactics of modern political campaigns. This course uses a case study approach to illustrate the theories and concepts of persuasion, message targeting, and message delivery in the campaign context. The primary focus of these case studies will be on contemporary campaign practices in the United States, but we also examine important historical cases that illustrate successful and unsuccessful attempts at mass persuasion.
Junior Honors Seminar | PS 494 | Course Syllabus
This upper-division undergraduate honors course introduces students to the process of scientific research by engaging them in original academic research projects that have the potential to contribute to current public and scholarly debates. The topics of these projects change from course to course, but all of them offer immersion learning experiences that involve students in real-world social science research using the methods of quantitative content analysis.
Content Analysis Practicum | CMN 529 | Course Syllabus
The objectives of this graduate-level methods course on content analysis are threefold. First, to teach a generic and multipurpose method of quantitative content analysis that is commonly employed by scholars of mass communication and political communication to measure trends and discourse elements in news coverage. Second, to give students practical experience in all stages of quantitative content analysis, from protocol design to validity testing, reliability testing, coding, data entry, and data analysis. Third, to produce publishable research papers on the dynamics of public communication.
Political Communication | CMN 529 / PS 519 | Course Syllabus
This graduate course is an advanced introduction to theory and research in the field of political communication. Its goal is to acquaint students with the field’s history, research questions, theoretical approaches, empirical accomplishments, and likely future directions.
Public Opinion in the Public Sphere | CMN 529 / PS 519 | Course Syllabus
This graduate seminar examines problems in the conceptualization of public opinion as a social phenomenon, in the communication of opinions from mass publics to political elites, and in the interpretation of public opinion as “the will of the people.” It seeks to address what may be the central questions of democratic politics: What is public opinion, how do we know it when we see it, and does it possess the various characteristics that theories of democracy suggest it should? In the process of addressing these questions, the course engages scholarship from multiple disciplines to clarify the roles that “bottom up” communication is supposed to play in the conduct of democratic politics.