About

James Henson is the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. His work involves conducting regular, non-partisan, statewide polls of registered voters in Texas, and making the results and data available for public use. His research focuses on public opinion, political behavior, and electoral dynamics within Texas, including issues such as voter concern over gas prices, attitudes towards U.S. military actions, and perceptions of the country's direction. Henson's contributions include overseeing the Texas Politics Project's educational efforts, producing courses, and developing open-source resources for teaching and understanding Texas politics and government. His work also involves analyzing polling data, visualizing public opinion, and engaging in public discourse through podcasts and events related to Texas political developments.

Research topics

• Political science
• Computer science
• Public administration
• Economics
• Materials science

Selected publications

• Southern Democracy or Southern Oligarchy?

  2025-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This introductory chapter sets the problem of democratic development in the unequal South. It focuses on the debate of whether there was ever a solid white South unified around race, or whether there was always a division. Were there two Southern minds that deviated on the issues of oligarchy and democracy or just one based in the hierarchical plantation oligarchy. The chapter introduces the major historical eras in Southern political development and the critical junctures that divide them. It sumarizes the history of four lines of the author’s family lineages and how their narratives can illuminate Southern political development. The chapter closes with an overview of the rest of the book.

  PublisherDOI

• The Southern Fault Line

  2025-02-20

  bookSenior author

  Abstract The white South has always been of two minds on the desirability of democracy. Throughout U.S. history some white Southerners were vigorous proponents of the American democratic project. Others thought that participation in governing was more of a privilege granted only to those who proved themselves worthy through education and wealth. Blacks, treated as chattel property, were at first omitted from the discussion, but when emancipated joined the prodemocracy side of the debate. For most of Southern history, the division was geographic—upland small farmers inhabiting the Appalachian regions supporting the democratic project and the lowland planters and slaveholders opposing it. It reflected a politics of class: poor uplanders versus well-off planters. This book uses historical narratives based on the author’s classically Southern family to explore this division, and what happened to it. Because the family’s Alabama lineage incorporates both uplanders and planters, their stories can be used to map out more fully this division, trace it through history, and explore its impacts on the politics and history of the South. The book carries the narrative of the two Souths up through the 1960s, to the last throes of Jim Crow and the final attempts to revive an interracial Populist coalition of North Alabama whites and Blacks in the cities and on the former plantations. That attempt failed, overwhelmed by the intense politics of racial demagoguery as the civil rights movement reached its apogee.

  PublisherDOI

• The Life of a South Alabama Tenant Farmer

  2025-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter focuses on the life of a Southern white tenant farmer, Charles Cade Jones and his son, Thomas G. Jones, the author’s grandfather. Charles Cade Jones could not support his family through his carpentry work, so he became a tenant farmer. His son, the author’s grandfather, wrote, “With his ax on his shoulder, he walked into the forest, and with his own hands, felled the trees and hewed the trunks into shape and built a house for his growing family. . . . They called it a log cabin, but the young wife and mother said it was the most beautiful house she had ever seen.” The problem was that when a lease was lost, the tenant lost his investment in the property, and had to start again.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Democracies Better at Solving Problems than Non-Democratic Regimes?

  The Forum · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Are democracies better at solving problems than non-democratic regimes? If so, what elements of democracies make them better? How do different political systems monitor and manage problems that are long-term? In this paper I sketch the issues in making such comparisons, and report some of the major findings at present. Then I point to possible directions for making those comparisons by linking components of the problem-solving paradigm to specific elements of democratic institutions and governance.

  PublisherDOI

• A radical idea tamed: the work of Roger Cobb and Charles Elder

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Plantation Politics

  2025-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract James Powell Carr moved to Sumter County at the middle of the 19th century, bringing his slaves. He was representative of the small-time planters who supported oligarchical government that characterized the slaveholding South. During the Civil War he signed up with a Confederate partisan ranger regiment, basically a unit that raided Union supply lines and known Union supporters without military supervision. Much of the Carr wealth was lost because of Emancipation, but James Powell, like most plantation owners, reestablished a considerable amount of it. After the war he worked as an election official in which role he either engaged in fraud or watched as it happened. The stealing of Black votes in Sumter County was rampant, and Powell Carr engaged in it.

  PublisherDOI

• Newton to Einstein: Axiom-Based Discovery via Game Design

  ArXiv.org · 2025-09-05

  preprintOpen access

  This position paper argues that machine learning for scientific discovery should shift from inductive pattern recognition to axiom-based reasoning. We propose a game design framework in which scientific inquiry is recast as a rule-evolving system: agents operate within environments governed by axioms and modify them to explain outlier observations. Unlike conventional ML approaches that operate within fixed assumptions, our method enables the discovery of new theoretical structures through systematic rule adaptation. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through preliminary experiments in logic-based games, showing that agents can evolve axioms that solve previously unsolvable problems. This framework offers a foundation for building machine learning systems capable of creative, interpretable, and theory-driven discovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Enabling AI in Computer Aided Design through Representations

  ResearchWorks at the University of Washington (University of Washington) · 2024-01-01

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024

  Publisher

• Installation and integrated testing of magnets for the ESS Linac

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The European Spallation Source (ESS) linear accelerator is designed to accelerate a 62.5 mA, 2.86 ms, 14 Hz proton beam up to 2 GeV at the entrance of a rotating tungsten (W) target. Normal Conducting Linac (NCL) and Superconducting Linac (SCL) parts of the accelerator contain over 200 quadrupole, dipole and corrector magnets of different types and parameters for beam envelope and trajectory control. All magnets have been provided to ESS by in-kind collaborators and research institutes across Europe. Following the delivery of these components and their respective power converters to ESS, this proceeding presents the status of the installation together with the methodology and first obtained results from system local and integrated testing phase.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Advanced delay-time analysis applied to carbon black powder production

  International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering · 2024-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Delay time models (DTM) for series systems divide the failure of a system into the appearance of defects and the delay until the breakdown. During this work, we developed four new DTM whose main novelty consists of considering cheaper online inspections preceding offline inspections. Our numerically tested models were applied to a previously published study about a carbon black factory. After the improvement of problematic assumptions, the optimal inspection period turns out to be considerably larger than in the previous study, which emphasises the need to flexibly develop new delay-time models when facing unusual situations and to avoid a reliance on black boxes. The correct handling of environmental consequences has a tremendous impact upon the optimal maintenance decision.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Pine

  21 shared

• Farya Phillips

  19 shared

• Jennifer Currin‐McCulloch

  Colorado State University

  16 shared

• Abby R. Rosenberg

  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

  14 shared

• Donald E. Fry

  Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital

  14 shared

• Lailea Noel

  The University of Texas at Austin

  10 shared

• Qi Chen

  10 shared

• Jessica Parker-Raley

  9 shared