Charles S. Taber

Charles Taber is Provost and Executive Vice President and Professor of Political Science at Kansas State University, with research interests in political psychology and public opinion, international relations and foreign policy decision-making, and computational models of political cognition.

Taber has been a pioneer in the use of computational modeling in political science, publishing the first article using this method in a major political science journal (American Political Science Review, 1992) as well as a primer for computational modeling in the social sciences (Computational Modeling, Sage, 1996). Taber has also made a significant contribution to the growing literature on the psychological mechanisms that drive public opinion. In 2000, he received the Paul Lazersfeld outstanding paper award at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting for a paper on bias in reasoning about political issues which was later published in the American Journal of Political Science. A special issue of the journal Critical Review is devoted to this paper, with a reprint of the original article followed by the commentaries of leading political scientists and psychologists. Along with Milton Lodge, Taber has developed an influential theory of political information processing with over a dozen articles published in leading journals (including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Political Psychology). This work has led to two books with Cambridge University Press (2013, 2018). Taber’s research and career have been the subject of profiles in Science, Scientific American, and Access, and his work has been quoted in the popular press.

He is past editor of the journal Political Psychology and currently serves on the editorial boards of four political science journals.