W. Scott Langford
Assistant Professor of Public Administration · Texas State University
I study how local governments and community organizations absorb shocks — which ones fail, which survive, and what the survivors give up to stay open.
About
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas State University, where I teach in the MPA program. I previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and earned my PhD in Public Policy from UNC Chapel Hill.
My research asks how the organizations that hold a community together — city and county governments, nonprofits, community banks, small employers — hold up when something goes wrong. Extreme weather, financial crises, and the opioid epidemic are the shocks I study most. The questions are administrative ones: which organizations fail and which survive, what the survivors cut in order to stay open, and whether the public programs meant to buffer these events actually do.
Answering them means building data that does not yet exist. Most of what governments and nonprofits disclose is technically public but practically unusable — buried in PDF financial statements, meeting minutes, and filings never designed to be read at scale. I assemble those documents into research datasets and analyze them with applied econometrics. More on the data.
Recent work has appeared in the Journal of Regional Science, Economic Development Quarterly, Regional Studies, and the Journal of Business Venturing Insights. My independent research has been funded by the Kenan Institute for Private Enterprise.
I also build and maintain the Academic Job Market Report as a service to the field — a nightly-updated public dashboard of open U.S. faculty positions across every academic discipline, with public administration and public policy as the default view, alongside federal, nonprofit, and policy think-tank public-service openings. It is free and requires no account. It exists because the postings a job seeker needs are scattered across hundreds of separate portals.
I’m available for invited talks, consulting, and media inquiries — best reached by email.
Contact
Email: scottlangford@txstate.edu
Office: Trauth Huffman Hall 355, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
Office hours: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00–4:00 p.m.
For something less formal: a little about me.