Rate My Professor Doug Rice

Doug Rice is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, holding appointments as Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, Political Science Research Methods Concentration Coordinator, and Associate Director of Graduate Curriculum and Initiatives for the Data Analytics and Computational Social Science program. He is a faculty affiliate of the Computational Social Science Institute and the Institute for Social Science Research in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Rice received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University in 2013, an M.A. in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University in 2010, and an M.A. in Political Science from Villanova University in 2008.

Rice's research focuses on judicial policymaking in American politics, with particular emphasis on the power of courts in the policymaking process and the implications of delegating policymaking authority to judicial institutions within a democratic system. His work examines judicial decision-making, opinion writing, text-as-data methods, separation of powers dynamics, media coverage of judicial institutions, and the broader influence of courts on public policy. He integrates computational social science techniques to analyze court opinions and related phenomena. Rice was awarded the 2025-26 Faculty Fellowship from the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass Amherst to develop responsible AI curriculum for the DACSS program. His publications appear in premier outlets including The Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Political Science Research & Methods, The Journal of Law and Courts, and American Politics Research. Key works include the book Lighting the Way: Federal Courts, Civil Rights, and Public Policy (University of Virginia Press); "Corpus-based Dictionaries for Sentiment Analysis of Specialized Vocabularies" (Political Science Research & Methods, 2019); "Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases" (The Journal of Law and Courts, 2015); "Issue Divisions and U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making" (The Journal of Politics, 2016); and "Racial Bias in Legal Language" (Research & Politics, 2019). Rice's scholarship has garnered over 767 citations, contributing substantially to law and courts, American politics, and computational social science.