Welcome! I’m Dr. Eric R. Schmidt (Ph.D, Indiana University, 2021). Since August 2023, I have served as an Assistant Professor of Government and Politics (tenure-track) at Millsaps College (Jackson, MS), where I teach introductory and upper-level courses on U.S. politics, research methods, and constitutional law; co-coordinate the Millsaps Civil Discourse Project; direct our Legislative Fellows Program; serve as the Pathways Coordinator for Law, Politics, and Social Leadership; and chair the College’s Pre-Law Steering Committee. Prior to arriving at Millsaps, I served for two years as a Political Science Teaching Fellow at Concordia College (Moorhead, MN), where I rebuilt and renewed the College’s pre-law advising program, researched the negative effects of partisan polarization on faculty-student interactions, and received the Student Government Association’s Distinguished Faculty Service Award for AY 2022-2023.
Alongside my teaching and service responsibilities, I maintain an active research agenda. As a scholar of long-term partisan change in the United States, my work explores how partisan polarization has influenced the relationship between citizens’ partisanship, ideology, and group attachments.
Most recently, I published The Political Dynamics of Partisan Polarization (Cambridge University Press, 2025), co-authored with Ted Carmines and Paul Sniderman. Using 50+ years of public opinion data, we demonstrate that polarization among U.S. citizens has been almost entirely confined to partisans that know and share their party’s ideological orientation. My work has also appeared in Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, P.S.: Political Science & Politics, Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, and The Palgrave Handbook of Populism.
For the most recent copy of my curriculum vitae, click here.
Eric R. Schmidt, PhD 