Trust and Confidence in Elections in Rural America
Please join us on Wednesday, February 11, 2026 at 11:00 am Pacific for the next episode of Election Science Office Hours, a webinar series moderated by R. Michael Alvarez, PhD, Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech and Co-Director, Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP).
During this episode of Election Science Office Hours, Professor Alvarez’s guest will be Cameron Wimpy, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Government, Law & Policy at Arkansas State University. In this episode, Professors Alvarez and Wimpy will discuss the new project to study election administration in rural America. What are the unique problems that election officials face in rural parts of America? What issues do voters face in rural America? We'll also talk about doing research in rural America, which has some tricky methodological issues, and is generally ignored in a lot of the large N national studies of election administration that collect data from a large number of respondents across multiple elections to provide a comprehensive view of changes in political behavior and public opinion over time.
Cameron Wimpy is an associate professor of political science and chair of Government, Law & Policy at Arkansas State University. He has a strong background in comparative public administration, election administration, political economy, political methodology, and rural public policy. Starting in Fall 2022, he also serves as the founding director of the Institute for Rural Initiatives. Wimpy has previously managed applied research on the scientific study of elections at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab and was an affiliate faculty member with the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He grew up on Crowley’s Ridge in the Arkansas Delta and has a PhD in Political Science from Texas A&M University.
Register in advance for this meeting: https://caltech.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wcK0TLhNTtm7OvouStD3bg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
For more information, please contact Sabrina Hameister by phone at 626-395-4228 or by email at sboschet@caltech.edu.