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I am Professor of Government, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, and Director of the Program in Politics and Law.

My research focuses on American and comparative politics, particularly elections, public opinion, and lawmaking.

I have published articles on economic sanctions in international relations, third party candidates in elections, economic voting, referendums and initiatives, and divided government.  My current research includes projects on complexity in public opinion and the relationship between federal spending and elections.  Most of my work is based on experiments, quantitative methods, survey research, or game theory.

I teach Introduction to American Politics, Campaigns & Elections, American Political Behavior, Lawmaking and Political Institutions, Game Theory, Applied Multivariate Statistics, and Causal Models. I have been a visiting lecturer at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and Peking University. I studied for my Ph.D. at Duke University and my B.A. at the University of Virginia.

The tabs above will direct you to my curriculum vitae, current and published research, and the classes I teach.

Select Publications:

Agadjanian, Alexander, and Dean Lacy, Changing Votes, Changing Identities? Racial Fluidity and Vote Switching in the 2012–2016 US Presidential Elections. 2021, Public Opinion Quarterly 85(3, Fall): 737–752, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfab045

Lacy, Dean, Emerson M. S. Niou, Philip Paolino, and Robert A. Rein. 2019. Measuring Preferences for Divided Government: Some Americans Want Divided Government and Vote to Create It.  Political Behavior. First on-line 22 December 2017

Lacy, Dean, and Dino P. Christenson. 2017. Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting. Political Behavior. 39(2):347-75. First on-line 09 August 2016.

Lacy, Dean. 2014. Moochers and Makers in the Voting Booth:  Who Benefits from Federal Spending, and How Did They Vote in the 2012 Presidential Election? Public Opinion Quarterly 78(S1):255-275.

Lacy, Dean, and Emerson M.S. Niou. 2013. Nonseparable Preferences and Issue Packaging in Elections.  In Schofield, Norman, Gonzalo Caballero, and Daniel Kselman, eds., Advances in Political Economy:  Institutions, Modeling, and Empirical Analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Lacy, Dean, and Emerson, M.S. Niou. 2012.  Information and Heterogeneity in Issue Voting:  Evidence from the 2008 Presidential Election in Taiwan.  Journal of East Asian Studies 12(1):119-141.

Norris, Catherine J., Amanda G Dumville, Lacy, Dean P. 2011. Affective Forecasting Errors in the 2008 Election: Underpredicting HappinessPolitical Psychology 32(2):235-49.

Lacy, Dean and Paolino, Philip. 2010. Testing Proximity Versus Directional Voting Using ExperimentsElectoral Studies 29:460-71.