Hello! My name is Anna Gunderson. I am an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. I am also a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Law and Democracy and the Initiative for Law, Societies, and Justice, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and hold a courtesy affiliation with the Government Department. Before coming to UT in 2024, I was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Emory University in 2019.

I study American politics, specifically the politics of punishment, policing, and the courts. My interests include criminal justice policy, state politics, gender and representation, the politics of race, and public policy. My work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research, the Journal of Law and Courts, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Urban Affairs Review, and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. I received the 2025 APSA State Politics & Policy Emerging Scholar Award. My co-authored article on racial bias in police shootings won the 2023 Joseph Bernd Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Politics.

My book, Captive Market: Accountability and State Prison Privatization, was published with Oxford University Press in 2022. I consider the institutional factors contributing to American states' decisions to adopt private prisons. I find none of the expected predictors of this policy contribute to the likelihood a state adopts it. Rather, I argue prisoners' rights litigation conditioned states' response to prison overcrowding, thus resulting in the unintended consequence of private prison adoption. This work received the 2020 Mooney Prize for the best dissertation in state politics and policy, the 2020 Neal Tate Award, the 2019 Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Prize from the Public Choice Society, and the 2019 Best Graduate Student Paper award from the APSA Law and Courts Section.  

With Kirsten Widner, I am also the author of The Haves and Have-Nots in Supreme Court Representation and Participation, 2016 to 2021 (Cambridge University Press, Elements in American Politics, 2024). I am currently writing a book on state pardons, commutations, and the determinants of clemency along with several other working projects on policing, prosecutors, jail deaths, among others..

You can contact me via my UT email, anna.gunderson@austin.utexas.edu. You can also follow me on Bluesky @annagunderson.