About

Frank Baumgartner is a professor in the Department of Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has a history of hiring both undergraduate and graduate students to work on various research projects, typically involving computer- and internet-based work. Baumgartner emphasizes training students who are interested in continuing their studies in graduate school, potentially working on theses related to his research projects, and those who wish to stay involved for several years or possess particular technical skills. He holds weekly meetings to discuss problems, track progress, and maintain involvement among his student researchers. Due to limited funding, he can only hire students for up to about 10 hours a week, with most students working fewer hours. His approach to student research involves a training period followed by independent work with regular progress reports.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Geography
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Demographic economics
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Medicine
• Demography
• Psychology
• Business
• Astrophysics
• Mathematics
• Transport engineering
• Environmental health
• Statistics
• Physics
• Social psychology
• Public administration
• Finance
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Targeting young men of color for search and arrest during traffic stops: evidence from North Carolina, 2002–2013

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  North Carolina mandated the first collection of demographic data on all traffic stops during a surge of attention to the phenomenon of “driving while black” in the late 1990s. Based on analysis of over 18 million traffic stops, we show dramatic disparities in the rates at which black drivers, particularly young males, are searched and arrested as compared to similarly situated whites, women, or older drivers. Further, the degree of racial disparity is growing over time. Finally, the rate at which searches lead to the discovery of contraband is consistently lower for blacks than for whites, providing strong evidence that the empirical disparities we uncover are in fact evidence of racial bias. The findings are robust to a variety of statistical specifications and consistent with findings in other jurisdictions.

  PublisherDOI

• The U.S. Death Penalty as Torture

  South Central Review · 2025-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: Though of course the U.S. Supreme Court has never declared this to be true, many elements of the U.S. death-penalty system constitute torture. The threat of death is real; it is slow; it is often repeated, sometimes removed, sometimes reinstated; it is imposed randomly and capriciously; conditions of confinement induce trauma; and the executions themselves are often botched. We first review definitions of torture, then we review various factual elements of the modern death penalty system (e.g., that in place since the monumental Furman decision eliminated all existing death sentences in 1972) that arguably constitute torture. There is nothing isolated about the torture elements of the U.S. death-penalty system. There is perhaps no method to avoid elements of psychological torture, given the slow, premeditated, ritualized, and bureaucratic nature of any state machinery of death. The U.S. death-penalty system systematically subjects thousands of individuals to psychological torment in a number of ways that we document here. Because the U.S. is a representative democracy, all Americans share responsibility for these outcomes, though almost none are aware of what we describe.

  PublisherDOI

• At the intersection: Race, gender, and discretion in police traffic stop outcomes

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-11

  articleOpen access

  Racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes are widespread and well documented. Less well understood is how racial disparities may be amplified or muted in different contexts. Here we focus on one such situational factor: whether the initial traffic stop was related to a traffic safety violation or a (broadly defined) investigatory purpose. This is a salient contextual characteristic as stop type relates to different levels of assumed discretion and purpose. While all traffic stops involve some officer discretion, investigatory stops are more easily used as justifications to conduct a search based on an officer's diffuse suspicion; traffic safety stops are more often just what they seem. Using millions of traffic stops from several states, we show that black male drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband and that this relationship is amplified where the initial stop purpose is investigatory. One implication of this is that one path to alleviating disparities in traffic stops for agencies is emphasizing traffic safety, rather than using stops as a supplemental investigatory tool.

  PublisherDOI

• 1 Innocence and the Death Penalty

  New York University Press eBooks · 2025-06-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Distracted partners: Why police traffic enforcement is inefficient

  Policy Studies Journal · 2025-01-07

  articleSenior author

  Abstract As communities throughout the country adopt policies designed to reduce traffic fatalities to their lowest possible numbers, they rely heavily on police for traffic enforcement. Within policing communities, however, traffic stops are seen not only as a means to encourage better driving, but also as an important tool for drug interdiction and crime control. This renders the police “distracted partners” in the fight against dangerous driving. We analyze 246,003 stops conducted by the San Diego Police Department using geolocated traffic‐stop data. We compare a model of traffic stops driven by injury‐causing collisions to models where the stops are associated with crime and minority population. We find that the police are attentive to collisions but driven more by crime and minority population levels. We conclude that traffic safety efforts could more effectively be enhanced by a non‐police agency devoted solely to reducing serious collisions, fatalities, and the public health threats from cars, with the police focused on crime control. The combined mission for the police of doing traffic safety and crime control results in suboptimal outcomes with regard to crash and injury prevention.

  PublisherDOI

• John Kingdon and the evolutionary approach to public policy and agenda setting

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  John Kingdon's academic writings were consistently characterized by close attention to observational data, and Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Kingdon, 1984) was also influenced by an intellectual community associated with the behavioral study of elites and recent developments in the study of biology, evolution, and genetics. The book innovated by providing a new and innovative description of the policy process, one that rang true to policymakers and journalists as well as to political scientists. It drew more from evolutionary biology than from classical economics, a point that derives from Kingdon's approach of putting the empirical puzzle at the center and finding the right theoretical perspective to explain and understand it. The book has had a lasting impact on the field because of these empirical and theoretical innovations.

  PublisherDOI

• Better for everyone: Black descriptive representation and police traffic stops

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Racial disparities in citizen interactions with police are ubiquitous concerns in American communities. What difference does electoral representation make? We demonstrate that black descriptive representation in local government affects police activity and scrutiny in a given community. We use a new dataset comprised of over 79 municipal police departments spanning 6 states, based on tens of millions of individual-level traffic stops. In cities and towns with majority-black city councils, traffic stops are less likely to result in a search. This decline in search rates affects both white and black drivers, though the decline is larger for black drivers. Even after controlling for socioeconomic factors, segregation, and crime rates, descriptive representation still matters. A city council composed of a majority of black members is associated with important differences in policing, affecting both white and black residents.

  PublisherDOI

• Racial Resentment and the Death Penalty

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We explore the annual number of death sentences imposed on black and white offenders within each US state from 1989 through 2017, with particular attention to the impact of aggregate levels of racial resentment. Controlling for general ideological conservatism, homicides, population size, violent crime, institutional and partisan factors, and the inertial nature of death sentencing behavior, we find that racial hostility translates directly into more death sentences, particularly for black offenders. Racial resentment itself reflects each state’s history of racial strife; we show powerful indirect effects of a history of lynching and of racial population shares. These effects are mediated through contemporaneous levels of racial resentment. Our findings raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the ultimate punishment, as they show its deep historical and contemporary connection to white racial hostility toward blacks.

  PublisherDOI

• Policymaking in times of crisis

  Journal of European Public Policy · 2025-09-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Governments consistently deal with crises, but some are larger than others, some are endogenously created, and some are exogenously imposed. This article introduces a Special Issue of the Journal in which 14 sets of contributors assess various elements of policymaking in times of crisis. We divide the contributions into those assessing public opinion responsiveness, institutional design and response, and identity-politics. As crises appear to be increasingly common, we assess their impacts on the policy process, concluding that no understanding of policymaking in general can be complete if it does not apply to policymaking in times of crisis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Purchasing privilege? How status cues affect police suspicion in routine traffic stops

  Politics Groups and Identities · 2024-07-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A police officer's decision to search a driver's car during a routine traffic stop is based on many variables and indicates that the officer views the driver with suspicion. In this paper, we ask whether driving a luxury-brand car reduces police suspicion during a traffic stop. We find significant reductions in rates of search for minority drivers of luxury cars, though these benefits fade away as the car grows older. We further explore the interactions between personal identity and vehicle type and find powerful effects associated with whether the vehicle indicates occupational status. Our study is based on more than 10 million traffic stops conducted by the Texas Highway Patrol. These findings add status cues to the long list of factors that appear to influence how police treat drivers during routine traffic stops.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Database Development For The Study Of Public Policy

  NSF · $207k · 2002–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Amber E. Boydstun

  University of California, Davis

  80 shared

• Bryan D. Jones

  68 shared

• Suzanna De Boef

  66 shared

• Richard Richardson Distinguished

  University of Antwerp

  49 shared

• Peter Van Aelst

  University of Antwerp

  49 shared

• William T. Kretzer

  University of Antwerp

  49 shared

• Christopher Ansell

  49 shared

• Paul Cairney

  49 shared

Education

• PhD, Political Science

  University of Michigan

  1986

• MA, Political Science

  University of Michigan

  1983

• BA, Political Science and French

  University of Michigan

  1980

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellow in 2023-24
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences