Brian J. Gaines

Brian Gaines is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a member of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

"Ideally, IGPA bridges the gap between rigorous academic work and actual public policy debates. Anyone who believes that academic work, even when narrowly (that is carefully) focused, is nonetheless informative for people making real-world decisions with more noise and uncertainty and with more consequences, should want to distill conclusions from academia into reader-friendly format. IGPA ensures that such distillation occurs," said Gaines.

His research interests are elections, political behavior, and political institutions. He is currently researching the effects of the uncontested Illinois legislative races on turnout, the seat shares of the parties, and outcomes of statewide races over the period 1982-2002. Gaines also has analyzed the empirics and theory of voting on The Weakest Link game show.

He says he was attracted to IGPA because, "I'm happy doing pretty narrowly defined work that is mostly of interest to my fellow political scientists, but I prefer that not ALL of my work be far removed from real-world policy discussions. The old joke that academics learn more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing sometimes worries me, and being associated with IGPA ensures that I have to think about practical applications and implications of work."

Professor Gaines joined the Department of Political Science in 1995, immediately after receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a visiting professor at the Department of Applied Economics at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium. And he has served on two Royal Commissions in his native Canada.

Professor Gaines's most recent publications include a collaboration with his Political Science colleague Wendy Tam Cho, "Breaking the (Benford) Law: Statistical Fraud Detection and Campaign Finance" published in The American Statistician and a collaboration with his IGPA colleague Jim Kuklinski and others, "Interpreting Iraq: Partisanship and the Meaning of Facts" published in the Journal of Politics.

Institute of Government and Public Affairs
University of Illinois
1007 W. Nevada
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-333-3340