Brian J. Gaines
Brian J. Gaines
Senior Scholar, IGPA
Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

bjgaines@illinois.edu
(217) 333-3340
Google Scholar ProfileDept. of Political Science Profile
Expertise:
Brian Gaines' research deals with all aspects of elections, electoral rules, and public opinion. Some of his recent work has dealt with campaign-finance fraud, pros and cons of convenience voting, inference from survey experiments, and assessing bias in electoral maps, and has appeared in such outlets as the American Statistician, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. He has published op eds in many newspapers in Illinois, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Wall Street Journal. He follows politics in the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Europe and Australia. Two of his major projects at present are a multi-nation survey about parties and partisanship and a study of public opinion about fairness in taxes.
Former Experience
Professor Gaines has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Applied Economics at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, and at the Institute of International Studies, at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. In 2011-12, he was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He served on the (Fisher) Royal Commission for Electoral Boundaries in British Columbia, and has done local redistricting in California.
He has consulted with the (Lortie) Royal Commision on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, Polimetrix, YouGov, CSI, and legal teams working on election-related cases, including vote fraud and early-voting bias.
From July 2011 through December 2015, Professor Gaines was the editor of American Politics Research. From 2010 to 2013 he co-edited The Political Methodologist with Jake Bowers and Wendy Cho. At IGPA, he was the editor of Policy Forum from 2006-2008 and 2009-2011.
Education
AM, PhD: Stanford University, 1989, 1995
BA (honours): University of British Columbia, 1988
IGPA Research By Brian J. Gaines
December 10, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
November 9, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
September 29, 2020Policy Spotlight: Ongoing Expert Advice on Pandemic Policies
September 24, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
September 2, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
August 4, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
July 21, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
July 13, 2020How Will Illinois’ Push for Mail-In Balloting Affect Voter Confidence in the November 2020 Election?
July 7, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
June 23, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
June 9, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
June 2, 2020Pandemic Stress Indicator: Expert Panel
March 25, 2014Public opinion and political viability of budget tools
February 20, 2013Revisiting redistricting
February 20, 2013The Illinois Report 2013
May 25, 2011Rethinking redistricting
January 1, 2011Picking the president by popular plurality? Prospects and partisan politics
January 21, 2009Some implications of the 2008 election
January 21, 2009The Illinois Report 2009
January 1, 2009Wall Street weakly, or how and when Obama won the presidential race
November 3, 2007What odds for the sale of the Illinois state lottery?