Catie Bailard

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Dr. Catie Snow Bailard is an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs.  Before joining the SMPA faculty in 2009, Dr. Bailard received her doctorate in political science from UCLA with concentrations in American Politics, Formal and Quantitative Methods, and International Relations. Throughout Catie's academic career, her research has primarily focused on the intersection of politics and information and communication technologies. 

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 been focused on broadening the field by focusing on political outcomes beyond elections, national contexts beyond the American borders, and communication technologies beyond television. As part of this effort, 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 the 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 recent years, Dr. Bailard has shifted her research focus closer to home to investigate the deleterious uses and effects of digital media on U.S. democracy.

In acknowledgment of her pioneering work, Dr. Bailard received the prestigious Sanders-Kaid award from the International Communication Association for the best paper published in political communication in 2012. Her article, “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 communication papers published in the twenty-three most prominent political science and communication journals. Additional awards for her work include the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Best Book Award in the field of Information Technology and Politics for Democracy’s Double-Edged Sword: How Internet Use Changes Citizens’ Views of their Government. 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, for their article “Combating Hateful Attitudes and Online Browsing Behavior: The Case of Antisemitism."

Catie is a fifth-generation Californian and, before moving to DC, she was a lifelong resident of the Golden State. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she remains a devoted fan of the 49ers.