Anna Weissman

Anna Weissman is a Political Scientist completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. She will join the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Fellow starting September 2025. Her academic home is within the Department of Political Science in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley.

• PhD, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley (2025)
• B.A., Political Science, Philosophy, and German, Tufts University

Weissman's research focuses on representation, local political economy, and political geography, with specific attention to who holds power in American local governments and how this drives policymaking. Her work examines municipal officials' embeddedness in their communities and the implications for policy outcomes, particularly relating to land use, with special interest in small-town and rural America. Another significant branch of her research investigates attitudes about descriptive representation at the national level. She employs diverse methodological approaches including causal inference designs for observational data, text analysis, and original surveys and survey experiments.

Her publication record shows a strong focus on representation and local politics, with articles appearing in top political science journals including the Journal of Politics and the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. Her work demonstrates consistent attention to how representation functions across different political contexts and scales.

• Research Associate, Political Science Department, MIT (prior to graduate school)

Weissman has served as a Graduate Student Instructor and Tutor at UC Berkeley for multiple courses including Decision Analysis and Quant Methods, Politics of Public Policy, Introduction to American Politics, and research methods courses. Her teaching experience spans both graduate and undergraduate levels, demonstrating her commitment to political science education.

Her research portfolio includes significant work on local government dynamics, representation, and political behavior, with several publications in prestigious journals and multiple works in progress examining the relationship between place-based attachment and political attitudes.