​I am a Professor of Political Science, Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Communication, and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis nestled in the (self-proclaimed) bike capital of the US. I am an Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, and I serve on the editorial boards of the Women Also Know Stuff initiative, the Text as Data Association, and the journals Journal of Public Policy, International Journal of Press/Politics, and Political Communication.

​I hail from Penn State University, St. John's College, and the People's Republic of Boulder. I spent the 2010-2011 year as a Marie Curie Fellow working with the amazing Media Movements and Politics (M2P) research team at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. During the 2020-2021 academic year I will be a Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

If politics is about 'who gets what, when, and how' (Lasswell 1936), then political science is, in large part, the study of how scarce resources get distributed. These resources take many forms: money, votes, and troops are just a few. My research centers on the distribution of an especially scarce resource: attention. I study the causes, dynamics, and political effects of media attention and media framing.

Contact Information:
One Shields Ave.
469 Kerr Hall
Davis, CA 95618
aboydstun [at] ucdavis [dot] edu