Georgia Kernell

Georgia Kernell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications with a courtesy appointment in Political Science at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and previously served as Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Her research focuses on political parties, elections, and quantitative methodology.

Dr. Kernell directs the Political Party Organizations Research Lab, overseeing data collection projects with graduate and undergraduate researchers. She teaches courses in political communication and research methods.

Her research examines how party organizations influence candidate strategies and voter behavior in parliamentary democracies. Current work investigates organizational structures in long-standing democracies and their impact on representation and electoral success. Methodologically, she employs formal modeling, experimental designs, and large-scale data analysis.

Publications demonstrate consistent focus on electoral behavior, party dynamics, and political communication, with recent expansion into social media and computational methods. Research integrates comparative and American politics perspectives.

• APSA POP/Party Politics Award
• Jack Walker Award (Honorable Mention)
• Hellman Fellow Award
• NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant

She has advised multiple doctoral candidates including Kevin Mullinix (University of Kansas) and Xin Sun (Trinity College Dublin). Funded research includes NSF grants and internal UCLA awards supporting data collection on party organizations and electoral behavior.