Zion Little

PhD Candidate  ·  Department of Political Science  ·  Washington University in St. Louis

Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in the Political Science department at Washington University in St. Louis. I'm a formal theorist studying the political economy of attention, bureaucratic capacity and public trust, and signaling structures that shape information and learning. My work models how political actors manipulate attention and information to influence what people learn and what that means for public welfare and accountability. The aim is twofold: to deepen our understanding of how attention shapes accountability, institutional trust, and capacity, and to produce clear, testable predictions about these relationships.

Before grad school, I received my BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I will be on the job market in the 2026–2027 academic year.

Working Papers

Strategic Attention Capture: Flooding the Zone and Attention Management Job Market Paper
Coming soon
Managing Relationships: Bureaucratic Discretion and Credibility
Draft available upon request
Preregistration and Strategic Private Experimentation
With Keith Schnakenberg & Jacob Montgomery  ·  Coming soon
Attentive Cheap Talk
Coming soon
Laboratories of Democracy: State Policy Experimentation and Partisan Learning
Coming soon

Contact

l.zion@wustl.edu

Department of Political Science  ·  Washington University in St. Louis
MSC 1063-228-249, One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130