Julia Azari  Julia R. Azari is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Marquette University, where she is also the Assistant Chair of the Department of Political Science. Azari studies the American Presidency and political parties in the United States, with particular attention to partisanship in the United States and how these systems have changed since the early 20th century. Azari also engages in public communication about political science, including as a frequent contributor to the politics coverage of the data journalism website "FiveThirtyEight", a writer of the blog "Mischiefs of Faction", and a host of the political science podcast "Politics in Question". Azari attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She originally intended to become a political journalist, but realized that she enjoyed academic political science. She graduated with a B.A. degree in political science in 2002. She then received an M.Phil, an M.A., and a Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. In 2014 Azari published the book "Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate", which studies the history of the idea of a political mandate for the President of the United States, from Herbert Hoover in 1928 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Azari uses content analysis on presidents' communications to analyze how presidents have used the notion of a presidential mandate, showing that over the last several decades presidents have increasingly invoked their mandate to defend the legitimacy of the office. Together with William D. Adler, Azari won the 2019 Founder's Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association for their working paper "The Party Decides (Who the Vice President Will Be)". The Founder's Award "is given for the best paper on executive politics authored by a PhD-holding scholar at the previous year's" meeting of the American Political Science Association. Some of Azari's work in science communication, including posts on the "Mischiefs of Faction" blog, have also in turn been cited in academic literature. Azari has been a frequent contributor to the data journalism website "FiveThirtyEight" since 2016, both as an author of articles and as a guest on the "FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast". Azari regularly writes for "Mischiefs of Faction", which was founded as an independent political science blog in 2012, and for a period after 2015 was incorporated into "Vox". Azari has also appeared as an expert on television panels and interviews, including appearances on C-SPAN dating back to 2009, as well as on radio stations like Wisconsin Public Radio and KCRW.