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Core faculty

Devin Judge-Lord

Assistant professor
[email protected]

Devin Judge-Lord is an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He works at the intersection of social movements and technocratic policymaking, studying interactions among interest groups, legislators, and bureaucracies. His current work focuses on how public pressure campaigns affect agency rulemaking, especially climate and environmental justice campaigns. His other research projects address legislator behavior and capacity, money in politics, lobbying, and private governance. Judge-Lord employs a range of quantitative and qualitative methods, with particular contributions in the field of text analysis. By building large open-source datasets and methods to analyze large volumes of political texts, he aims to expand the aspects of policymaking that are open to systematic study.

He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Center for American Political Studies. Judge-Lord holds a BA in political science from Reed College, a Master’s in Environmental Science from Yale University, and a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to his academic career, Judge-Lord worked in local government and for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.Learn more on his personal site.

Educational background

  • MA and PhD in Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison
  • MESc in Environmental Policy and Law, Yale University
  • BA in Political Science, Reed College

Recent publications

  • “Campaign Contributions and Bureaucratic Oversight: A Case Study of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission” with Eleanor Powell and Justin Grimmer in Accountability Reconsidered: Voters, Interests, and Information in U.S. Policymaking, ed. Charles M. Cameron, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Sanford C. Gordon, Gregory A. Huber, Cambridge University Press (2022)
  • “Data and Methods for Analyzing Interest Group Influence in Rulemaking” with Daniel Carpenter, Brian Libgober, Steven Rashin. Interest Groups & Advocacy 9:425–435 (2020)
  • “Do Private Regulations Ratchet Up? How to Distinguish Types of Regulatory Stringency and Patterns of Change” with Benjamin Cashore and Constance McDermott in Organization & Environment 33:1 96–125 (2020)