Hello! I am an Assistant Professor of American Politics in the Political Science Department at The George Washington University, where I am also an affiliate of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. I received my PhD in Political Science at UCLA. My research interests lie at the intersection of political behavior and institutions, with a focus on representation. I am specifically interested in how partisan identification and animosity structures behavior across all levels of U.S. politics: national, state, and local. I utilize methods involving big data, machine learning, text-as-data, and survey experiments. My work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, PNAS Nexus, and the Election Law Journal, and has been cited in the New York Times. My dissertation and papers therein have been awarded the Christopher Z. Mooney Best Dissertation Prize and the SPPQ best paper award by APSA’s State Politics and Policy section.

My previous affiliations include the Polarization Research Lab at Stanford University (as a postdoctoral fellow), the UCLA COVID-19 Health and Politics project (as a research analyst) and Nationscape (as the project coordinator).

Outside academia, you can find me trail/mountain/long distance running (from nothing in particular) and thanklessly rooting for the Seattle Mariners.

Please contact me at derek.holliday AT gwu DOT edu