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 and political behavior in Texas, including issues such as gas prices, war with Iran, and the direction of the country. Henson's role includes overseeing the Texas Politics Project's educational efforts, producing courses, and developing open-source resources for teaching and learning about Texas politics and government. He is actively involved in analyzing polling data, producing visualizations, and engaging in public discussions on Texas political trends and electoral challenges.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Criminology
• Engineering
• Automotive engineering
• Transport engineering
• Environmental science
• Social psychology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Modeling and Validation of a Small-Scale Wave Energy Converter for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Applications

  Proceedings of the ... European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference · 2025-09-08

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Wave energy converters (WECs) have been used commonly in large-scale applications and are now included in several unmanned oceangoing vehicles. Wave energy is used to power propulsion systems and onboard instruments to increase deployment range and time, expanding the limits of ocean exploration. We describe the development and validation of a lumped parameter model representative of a small-scale WEC. This system can be useful for small marine systems and is motivated by Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) applications. Key components of the modeled heave-plate WEC include a surface element, a power take-off (PTO) and a negatively buoyant drag plate. The PTO is modeled as a mass-spring-damper and forces acting on the heave plate include nonlinear drag and added mass, forced by harmonic components. The surface element oscillates vertically in response to passing ocean waves, while the motion of the submerged heave plate is damped, resulting in a periodic differential in motion. As the surface float tends to pull the heave plate, an effectively tuned PTO captures this motion and efficiently converts it into electrical energy. The system is tuned for short period waves (1 to 6 sec) that are ubiquitous at moderate winds. Using the system model, the parameter space is explored under varying wave conditions, identifying optimal design configurations to maximize energy production. To validate the model, a physical prototype of the heave-plate generator was constructed and tested in a controlled experimental setting. The experimental apparatus features a linear actuator with an inline force sensor and component motion is assessed via video tracking. Results from these experiments provide critical insights into the performance of the PTO system under varying wave conditions, highlighting areas where the model aligns with and diverges from observed behavior. These findings informed iterative improvements to the model, enhancing its accuracy and reliability for future design iterations for an oceangoing WEC system.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing Socio-Geographic Boundaries and Inequality

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access

  How do patterns of racial inequality shape policing behavior in the United States? We investigate whether police engage in boundary maintenance at geographic points of racial difference. Critical race scholars suggest that police explicitly serve this function. Yet empirical studies are rare and limited to snapshots of a single city, making it hard to distinguish practices employed across departments from agency- and officer-level idiosyncrasies. We leverage high resolution data on police activity in seven U.S. cities to evaluate how police engage with racial boundaries. We find evidence that police activity is elevated in racial boundary zones relative to non-boundary zones, exceeds observed crime, and that racialized outcomes are as much a product of policing practices as they are of conflict between private citizens. We reorient the study of boundaries around top-down processes that lead to their regulation and identify an agenda for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Co-Development of Technology for Measuring Faecal Contamination of Drinking Water

  Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science · 2025-02-16

  article

  Participatory approaches to innovation aim to address persistent failures of technology to respond to end-user needs and context. Here, we present the results of a transdisciplinary project aimed at co-developing technology for water quality monitoring in developing countries. Drawing from social science, we developed and implemented a suite of approaches to engage community members and regional stakeholders in the innovation process. Part of our engagement activities involved sampling and molecular analysis of drinking water sources from two communities on the island of Efate in Vanuatu. The results revealed evidence for temporal variations in faecal contamination from different sources. This analysis was used to frame discussions about microbial contamination, water quality and health, which, along with other structured conversations, led to technical and institutional specifications for water quality sensing. Informed by these specifications, a device for monitoring colorimetric changes in response to microbial growth was designed and built. This device was able to quantify growth of faecal coliform indicator species Escherichia coli inoculated into sterile media and could detect E. coli inoculated into sterilised river water and naturally occurring E. coli in raw river water samples. The limit of detection was a single E. coli cell in 100 mL of liquid.

  PublisherDOI

• The George Floyd Effect: How Protests and Public Scrutiny Changed Police Behavior

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-03-26 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Registering Returning Citizens to Vote: A Field Experiment in North Carolina

  The Journal of Politics · 2025-12-11

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Primary Submandibular Gland Squamous Cell Carcinoma

  Journal of Craniofacial Surgery · 2025-04-29

  article

  This case report and review examines the rare diagnosis and treatment of primary submandibular gland squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). In this paper, the authors report a case of primary submandibular gland squamous cell carcinoma from their institution. The authors then searched PubMed, ScienceDirect, and WileyOnline Library databases for previous case reports of this disease. The authors collected and reported the following: patient demographics, presentation, physical examination, lymph node involvement, histopathology, treatments, and patient outcomes. Thirteen case reports were found from 1992 to 2024. Primary submandibular gland squamous cell carcinoma, characterized by a diagnosis of exclusion, is a rare and aggressive malignancy best treated by a multidisciplinary team and likely treated with surgery and radiotherapy. Because it is a rare occurrence, it is essential to understand what primary submandibular gland squamous cell carcinoma is and how to best manage patients with this condition.

  PublisherDOI

• Feeling good about the ties that bind: neighborhood quality and affective linked fate among Black Americans

  Politics Groups and Identities · 2025-04-07 · 1 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Which trees matter most? The role of private garden trees and woodland cover for 3–30-300 success in seven English cities

  Urban forestry & urban greening · 2025-12-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  The 3–30–300 rule is a tool to evaluate access to trees and greenspaces and is gaining popularity in Europe but not yet in the UK. We calculate a 3–30–300 score per building to measure success at the rule in the local authority areas of seven English cities, examining how overall canopy cover and where the canopy is situated (e.g. woodland, street, private garden) influence performance. We find that a maximum of 2.1 % of buildings in the locations studied meet all three rules. Land use analysis indicates that increasing the density of trees in private gardens and increasing woodland cover are the most important factors for improving performance at the 3-tree and 30 % components in UK neighbourhoods. These recommendations should be applied to UK urban areas to improve overall performance at the 3–30–300 rule and increase access to trees and their benefits. We also explore how sensitive the results of the 3–30–300 analysis are to methodological choices by comparing results of network and line-of-sight analyses to simple buffers for the 3-tree and 300 m components of the rule, finding that more simple methods result in higher 3–30–300 scores and therefore suggest better 3–30–300 performance.

  PublisherDOI

• Getting Out the (Newly-Enfranchised) Vote: Encouraging Voter Registration After Rights Restoration

  Political Behavior · 2025-06-18

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Metastatic oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma to the thyroid: A case report and review of literature

  American Journal of Otolaryngology · 2024-04-16 · 1 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Leo Owens

  Emory University

  12 shared

• Björn Haßler

  5 shared

• Kassra A. R. Oskooii

  University of Delaware

  5 shared

• Laurel Eckhouse

  Teach For America

  5 shared

• Ariel White

  5 shared

• Kieron J. Doick

  Forest Research

  5 shared

• Matt A. Barreto

  4 shared

• Siyuan Wang

  Anhui Sanlian University

  4 shared

Labs

• The Texas Politics ProjectPI

  The Texas Politics Project conducts regular, non-partisan, statewide polls of registered voters in Texas, and makes the results and data available for public use.