T. Ryan Johnson


About Me

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2026. I use big administrative data, geographic information systems (GIS), and formal mathematical models of choice to study how institutional rules and market forces shape the behavior and attitudes of individuals.

Research Interests

  • American Politics: representation and electoral systems
  • Political Methodology: Bayesian statistics, causal inference, spatial statistics
  • Formal Theory: political economy, structural estimation

  • bin Oslan, Afiq and T. Ryan Johnson (2026). “Spies in a barrel: When to reel in espionage.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 38 (2), 87–109.
    PDF DOI
  • Johnson, T. Ryan and Dietrich Vollrath (2020). “The Role of Land in Temperate and Tropical Agriculture.” Economica 87 (348), 901–937.
    PDF Code DOI

  • “Kriging for Robust Standard Errors”
  • “Double/De-biased Machine Learning with Gaussian Processes for Spatial Confounding”
  • “Flood Risk and Turnout”
  • “Modeling Spatial Effects with Gaussian Processes”
  • “Estimating the Random Coefficients Logit with Voter Files”

Instructor of Record

  • Databases (CSCI 4710/5710), Saint Louis University, Fall 2026
  • Introduction to Computer Science: Taming Big Data (CSCI 1070), Saint Louis University, Fall 2024
  • Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS 4010/5010), Saint Louis University, Fall 2024
  • Developmental Mathematics II, Sam Houston State University, Fall 2011–Spring 2013

Teaching Assistant, Ph.D. Courses, Washington University in St. Louis

  • Math Camp (Summer 2021, Summer 2022)
  • Applied Statistical Programming (Spring 2022)
  • Formal Models of Political Institution (Fall 2021)
  • American Political Institutions (Fall 2021)
  • Causal Inference (Spring 2021)
  • Computational Social Science (Fall 2020)
  • Theories of Individual and Collective Choice II (Spring 2020)
  • Mathematical Modeling (Fall 2019)

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