Craig Volden is a professor of public policy and politics at the University of Virginia, with appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the department of politics. He studies the politics of public policy, with a focus on what policy choices arise within legislative institutions and within American federalism. He is founder and co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking (www.thelawmakers.org).

His most recent book, Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don’t), co-authored with Charles Shipan, explores the conditions under which governments learn from one another’s policy experiences and why that process often goes awry. This research is part of his long-standing interest in the diffusion of public policies, having published numerous articles of this topic in such journals as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Public Policy, and the Journal of Politics.