Tessa Provins

Tessa Provins is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She studies how institutional rules shape who is represented and what policy gets made, in state legislatures, in Congress and in tribal governments.

Her work on American legislatures examines how chamber design, procedure and staffing affect outcomes for groups divided by race, gender and party. Her research on Indigenous politics looks at how tribal governments are structured. It asks how that structure shapes relationships within and between tribes and with state and federal governments, and the policies that follow. She brings the same lens to elections, studying how the rules that govern voting access shape which communities can participate and, in turn, who is represented.

Her research appears in the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Publius, Public Choice and the Election Law Journal. Her work has been supported by Public Agenda and the American Political Science Association. She serves on the editorial boards of Legislative Studies Quarterly and State Politics & Policy Quarterly and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Effective Lawmaking.

Before joining Arizona in 2024, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She earned her Ph.D. (2018) and M.A. (2016) in Political Science from the University of California, Merced, where her dissertation won the Mooney Prize for best dissertation in American state politics. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Stanford University. She teaches American politics, state and legislative politics, Indigenous politics, gender and politics.