NEWS
Shane Singh
William A. Owens Creative Research Award 2022

Shane Singh, professor in the School of Public and International Affairs, is a leading scholar on the theory and substance of political behavior. He applies innovative methodologies to understand decision-making trends and attitudes among voters in democratic countries. His 2021 book “Beyond Turnout: How Compulsory Voting Shapes Citizens and Political Parties” explores how individuals and political elites change their behaviors in response to the incentives of compulsory voting. The downstream effects of compulsory voting, his research shows, are not unambiguously beneficial to democracy. He continues to branch out to other important research areas, including the causes of voter satisfaction with democracy. Singh is co-founder of the Election Research Group, which designs and employs proprietary web-based experiments to understand electoral behavior, focusing on the consequences of pre-election opinion polls for voter decision-making.