Catie Snow Bailard

Before joining the SMPA faculty in 2009, Catie Snow Bailard earned her doctorate in political science from UCLA. Throughout Catie's academic career, she has utilized a multi-methodological approach to explore significant research questions emerging at the intersection of politics and information and communication technologies (ICTs).

While the majority of early political communication research focused on the broadcast media’s impact on electoral outcomes in the United States, Catie’s research agenda has always been focused on broadening the field by focusing on political outcomes beyond elections, beyond the American borders, and media technologies beyond broadcast. As part of this effort, Catie was the first to research the effect of mobile phones on corruption in Africa, the first to conduct a comparative analysis of the internet’s impact on democratic attitudes, the first to demonstrate empirical effects of crowdsourced election-monitoring in Africa (with colleague Steve n Livingston) and the first to implement field experiments testing the effects of ICT on democratic attitudes in developing countries. Other publications include a comparative analysis of the effect of Chinese media in Africa on local public opinion, the effect of mobile phones on the probability of intrastate conflict, and the effect of broadcast corporations’ bottom lines on the tenor of news produced by their respective outlets.

In acknowledgment of her pioneering work, Catie received the prestigious Sanders-Kaid award from the International Communication Association for best paper published in political communication in 2012. Her paper, “Testing the Internet’s Effect on Democratic Satisfaction: A Multi-Methodological, Cross-National Approach,” was chosen unanimously by the five-person committee, out of an initial pool of 300 political communi cation papers published in the twenty-three most prominent political science and communication journals. She was also awarded the 2015 Best Book Award by the American Political Science Association in the field of Information Technology and Politics for her book, Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword: How Internet Use Changes Citizens’ Views of their Government.