Robert Huckfeldt

Robert Huckfeldt is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Davis. 

His primary research interests lie in participation, communication, and decision-making.  The focus of his work is on democratic electorates composed of individuals who are imbedded within social contexts and connected to one another through networks of communication.  He has carried out studies of urban neighborhoods, national election studies, comparative studies of urban areas, and cross-national election studies, as well as experimental studies and dynamic simulations of political processes.  He recently completed a study of political expertise and influence within communication networks, and he is currently engaged in a study of the civil rights movement and its implications for the transformation of American politics and political parties.  These various projects include survey analyses, group based experiments, network studies, agent based models, roll call analyses, and more.  In addition to a series of journal articles and essays, he is the author or coauthor of Politics in Context (Agathon, 1986); Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics (University of Illinois Press, 1987);  Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Political Disagreement (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Experts, Activists, and Democratic Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and    Race, Class, and Social Welfare: American Populism Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.  He is the past president of the Midwest Political Science Association; past chair of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section of the American Political Science Association; and the past president of the Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association.  He has served in a number of administrative roles, including political science department chair at Indiana University and UC Davis, and director of the UC Center Sacramento and the UC Davis Institute for Governmental Affairs.  He received the 1979 Schattschneider Award for the best doctoral dissertation in American government and politics; the Converse Award (with John Sprague) for Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication; the Graber Award (with Paul Johnson and John Sprague) for Political Disagreement; and the Ithiel de Sola Poole Award from the American Political Science Association.