Alison Craig is an assistant professor in the Department of Government in the fields of Public Policy, American Politics, and Political Methodology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation, is focused on improving our understanding of the day-to-day functioning of the United States Congress, with an emphasis on the relationships between members and the challenges of policymaking in the modern legislature. She is currently working on a book project, The Collaborative Congress, which examines how rank-and-file members of Congress work together to craft substantive and successful policy proposals in a polarized Congress. She also does work on distributive politics, interest groups, social network analysis, and text as data and has been published in the American Journal of Political Science. She teaches graduate level courses on American political institutions, statistical analysis, and network analysis, and undergraduate courses on the U.S. Congress and the policy process.
Alison earned her Ph.D. in 2017 from The Ohio State University and has a B.S. in political science from the University of Oregon. Prior to graduate school, she spent eleven years working for members of Congress on Capitol Hill and in her home state of Oregon. In that time she filled a variety of roles from communications to casework, but most of her work was as a legislative assistant handling domestic policy issues and as a field representative working with local governments and opinion leaders.