William Smith is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He studies elections and voting in the United States, with forays into the related topics of representation and responsiveness. In his dissertation, William studies how voters evaluate candidates, including the trade-offs voters make between the issue positions and personal qualities of candidates. He also examines the interactive effect of co-partisanship and candidate quality on candidate support. In other work, he formally studies the role of constituent contact on legislative behavior and develops a model to improve measurement of partisan competition within legislative chambers.

Before coming to Princeton, William earned a B.A. in Political Science, Economics, and Mathematics from the University of Miami.