I am an Assistant Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Rice University.
I received my PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2017. I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College’s Program in Quantitative Social Science and an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University.
Over the past twenty years the American media landscape has been redefined by the decline of local media outlets and the growth of online news consumption.
My research examines the political consequences of these developments by considering the capacity of media outlets to provide political news, the choices people make to consume (or avoid) political information and the effects of exposure to political messages on public opinion in this changing media environment.
I study these topics using a variety of data sources including digitized media directories, survey-linked web browsing data and survey experiments.
My research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics, as well as other academic journals.
I can be reached at erik.peterson@rice.edu