Christopher T. Kenny
About Me
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, working on American politics and political methodology. I am a founding member of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project. I am affiliated with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. In 2022, I was a fellow at the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.
My research focuses on primarily on American democratic institutions, with a particular emphasis on redistricting. My prior work has examined the net effect of gerrymandering in the US House in the 2020 cycle (PNAS 2023). With the ALARM Project, I’ve contributed to the creation of simulated redistricting plans for all congressional redistricting plans in the 2020 cycle (Nature: Scientific Data 2022) with ongoing work to extend this to the 2010 cycle. My research further includes a working paper with Cory McCartan, “Individual and Differential Harm in Redistricting”, which proposes an individual approach to fairness in redistricting. In a new working paper with the ALARM Project, “Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors”, we demonstrate that restrictive reforms improve partisan fairness of redistricting plans.
My work on census data relates to how the construction and privacy protection of census data impacts end users. My work on census data includes a policy evaluation paper which details the negative impact of differential privacy in the 2020 Census on redistricting and voting rights enforcement (Science Advances 2021). It further characterizes how certain communities, including Hispanic and multi-racial populations, are disproportionately impacted by the privacy noise in the 2020 Census (Science Advances 2024).
To support my own research and the research of others, I have developed over two dozen R packages, including redist, geomander, and censable. From January 2024 to July 2024, my packages were downloaded over 55,000 times from CRAN. For more information on the full suite of packages that I’ve developed, see my software page.
In Fall 2025, I will join Princeton DDSS as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. I expect to receive a PhD in Government from Harvard University in May 2025. I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Government from Cornell University in May 2019 and an M.A. in Government from Harvard University in May 2021.