Keith T. Poole

Dr. Keith Poole is the Philip H. Alston, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia. He co-invented the NOMINATE algorithm, the standard in studies of roll-call voting worldwide, with Howard Rosenthal.  Dr. Poole's research interests include methodology, political-economic history of American institutions, economic growth and entrepreneurship, and the political-economic history of railroads.  He has additionally coauthored studies of polarization in American politics, the dimensionality of American politics, party discipline, and party switching. Invented common-space and nonparametric scaling methods, allowing comparisons of politicians from different branches of government and in legislatures where parametric methods fail. He is ultimately the author or coauthor of over 60 articles, as well as the author of Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a coauthor of Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2013), Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (MIT Press, 2006, 2nd edtion 2016), Ideology In Congress (Transaction Press 2007), and Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Professor Poole has served on the editorial boards of Social Science Quarterly, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.  He has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie-Bosch Foundation, and the Center for Political Economy.