Zachary Courser, Ph.D.

Zachary C. Courser is Associate Professor of the Practice in Government at Claremont McKenna College, Co-Founder and Co-Director of CMC’s Policy Lab, and a Democracy Project Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. His research focuses on Congress, institutional capacity, public policy, elections, and the emerging implications of artificial intelligence for governance. His work combines institutional analysis with applied policy research and computational methods, including large language model (LLM) text analysis and large-scale administrative data analysis.

His forthcoming book, Empowering the Purse: How Earmarks Help Congress Do Its Job (Oxford University Press, 2027), examines congressional earmarking as a tool of representation and legislative capacity. His current research extends this work to questions of how Congress acquires and uses policy information, how pilot programs can support evidence-based policymaking, and how artificial intelligence may alter the informational capacity of public institutions. He is also the author of a forthcoming Oxford Handbook chapter on integrating large language models into text-as-data research in the social sciences.

Through the Policy Lab, Courser leads external-partner research projects with government agencies and policy organizations including the Bipartisan Policy Center, RAND Corporation, American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, and Los Angeles County Superior Court. He also directs undergraduate research teams working on Congress, voting access, AI-assisted text analysis, and large-scale administrative data. Before returning to CMC, he served as Senior Programme Director and Fellow at the Legatum Institute in London and taught at Sciences Po Lyon. He has also worked on Capitol Hill and directed CMC’s Washington Program.