Christopher D. Johnston
Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Duke University
My research and teaching explores the structure and origins of mass belief systems, social and political identities, and models of judgment and decision making.
I co-direct Worldview Lab at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics.
I am currently associate editor at the journal Political Psychology.
Research
I study how ordinary citizens form political beliefs, and why those beliefs hang together the way they do. Most of my work sits at the intersection of political psychology and public opinion, and returns to three questions: how political ideology is structured and measured, how personality and basic psychological dispositions shape policy preferences, and how the public evaluates political institutions — especially the U.S. Supreme Court.
I have written three books. Curbing the Court: Why the Public Constrains Judicial Independence (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Brandon L. Bartels) asks how mass opinion limits judicial independence. Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution (Cambridge University Press, 2017, with Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico) argues that the relationship between personality and economic ideology depends on political engagement; it received the David O. Sears Best Book on Mass Politics Award. The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012, with Howard G. Lavine and Marco R. Steenbergen) won both the Robert E. Lane Book Award and the David O. Sears Best Book Award.
My articles appear in Nature Human Behaviour, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, Political Behavior, and Electoral Studies, among other journals. A full list is on the research page.
My current project turns to political socialization — how children acquire values, partisan identities, and policy preferences in the first place — with support from Duke Bass Connections and the Institute for Humane Studies.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stony Brook University in 2011 and my B.A. in Psychology from Wake Forest University in 2005, and I have taught at Duke since 2011. I teach courses on political psychology, ideology and public opinion, and regression methods. My full CV is also available.