Chris Anderson is a political scientist. In his academic research, Anderson has sought to explain how economic and political structures shape citizens’ judgments and voting behaviors. He has won several scientific awards for his work and has held appointments at a number of universities, including Rice, Northwestern, Oxford, and Syracuse. Most recently, Chris was a Professor of Government and Labor Relations at Cornell University where he taught political economy and political sociology.
Chris is currently working on projects that examine the connection between elections and beliefs about representative institutions, the impact of welfare states on political and economic behavior, and the dynamics of public opinion about European integration. A forthcoming paper in the British Journal of Political Science investigates the connection between income inequality and people’s willingness to fight for their country during times of war.
Anderson also has applied his analytic and statistical expertise to quantitative soccer analytics, becoming a pioneer in this nascent field. This work has sought to produce data-based tools for building more effective teams, optimizing player and team performance, and managing clubs. Anderson’s best-selling book on football analytics, co-authored with David Sally, is titled The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong. Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team and subject of the book and movie Moneyball called it “A Must Read”, and The Times has hailed it as “the book that could change the game forever”. A “Moneyball meets Freakonomics” for football, The Numbers Game combines scientific principles and methods with football’s numbers to help fans see the game they love in a new light and unmask the ways in which managers and owners get it wrong, often to the tune of millions of pounds.
Anderson also has been a frequent commentator on the use of analytics in football and Big Data in high performing organizations and has been a speaker at a number of industry events, including the prestigious Sports Analytics Conference held annually in Boston by MIT’s Sloan Business School.
A native of Germany, he received his PhD from Washington University in St.Louis.