FACULTY | Charles Stewart III
Biography
Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985. His research and teaching areas include congressional politics, elections, and American political development.
His current research about Congress touches on the historical development of committees, party leadership, and Senate elections. Since 2001, Professor Stewart has been a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, a leading research efforts that applies scientific analysis to questions about election technology, election administration, and election reform. He is currently the MIT director of the project. Professor Stewart is an established leader in the analysis of the performance of election systems and the quantitative assessment of election performance.
Professor Stewart has been recognized at MIT for his undergraduate teaching, being named to the second class of MacVicar Fellows in 1994, awarded the Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the recipient of the Class of 1960 Fellowship. Since 1992, he has served as Housemaster of McCormick Hall, along with his spouse, Kathryn Hess.
Professor Stewart received his B.A. in political science from Emory University, and S.M. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Research
Fighting for the Speakership explores the development of the formal structure of political parties in Congress through the politics of electing Speakers of the House from 1789 to the present. This joint project with Jeffrey A. Jenkins (Virginia) combines historical narrative with modern analytical theory and statistical methods to explain how the House evolved from a series of ad hoc organizational arrangements to a resilient regime of legislative organization focused on party caucuses.
Senate elections before 1914 is a joint project with Wendy Schiller (Brown) to document and explain the election of U.S. senators before the passage of the 17th amendment. This NSF-funded project involves uncovering data about these elections through the examination of state legislative journals and primary historical sources. The project combines historical narrative with statistical analysis of election dynamics.
Measuring the performance of American elections is a project to assess the quality of elections through the development of metrics that describe how well American states perform all the functions that go into running elections well, ranging from registering voters to counting votes. This project involves collaborations with many scholars and institutions, particularly at Harvard, Caltech, and the Pew Center on the States Election Initiatives program.
Recent Publications
Fighting for the Speakership (with Jeffrey A. Jenkins), Princeton University Press, forthcoming.
Analyzing Congress, W.W. Norton, 2002, 2nd edition forthcoming.
Committees in the U.S. Congress (with Garrison Nelson), CQ Press, 2010.
"Race, Region, and Vote Choice in the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Rights Act," Harvard Law Review , 2010. (with Stephen Ansolabehere and Nathaniel Persily).
"Function follows Form: Voting Technology and the Law," in American Votes!, (with Stephen Ansolabehere) ed. Benjamin E. Griffith, American Bar Association, 2008.
"Improving the Measurement of Election System Performance in the United States" in Mobilizing Democracy: A Comparative Perspective on Institutional Barriers and Political Obstacles, ed. Margaret Levi, James Johnson, Jack Knight, and Susan Stokes, Russell Sage, 2008.
