Catie Snow Bailard
Catie Snow Bailard
Co-Director
Department: School of Media and Public Affairs
Contact:
Dr. Catie Snow Bailard is an associate professor in GW's School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) and Do-Director for the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics (IDDP). Before joining the SMPA faculty, Dr. Bailard received her doctorate in political science from UCLA in 2009.
Throughout her academic career, Dr. Bailard's research has focused on the intersection of democracy, media, and information and communication technologies (ICTs). While the majority of early political communication research focused on the television's impact on electoral outcomes in the United States, Dr. Bailard’s research agenda has always endeavored to broaden the field by focusing on political outcomes beyond elections, national contexts beyond the American borders, and ICTs beyond television. Dr. Bailard 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 investigate effects of crowdsourced election-monitoring in Africa (with colleague Steve Livingston), and the first to implement field experiments testing the effects of Internet use on democratic attitudes in non-Western countries.
In acknowledgment of her pioneering work, Dr. Bailard received the Sanders-Kaid award from the International Communication Association for best paper published in political communication in 2012, American Political Science Association’s 2015 Best Book Award by the in the field of Information Technology and Politics, as well as the 2023 Rebecca Morton Best Article Award from the Journal of Experimental Political Science (with co-authors Matthew H. Graham, Kimberly Gross, Ethan Porter, and Rebekah Tromble).
In recent years, Dr. Bailard has shifted her research focus closer to home to investigate the deleterious uses and effects of digital media for U.S. democracy. This includes experimental studies of interventions to counter the effects of hate and misinformation online, computational analyses of the correlation between online speech and offline violence by rightwing extremists, and experimental research into the relative effectiveness of various threat narratives to precipitate democratic backsliding among the American public.