Tim Hodson

Tim Hodson is a Blue Sky Consulting Group Affiliate and the Executive Director of the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento. The Center is a public policy, public service and curriculum support unit of the California State University. He is also a full professor with the Departments of Government and Public Policy and Administration.

A graduate of CSU, Fullerton, Dr. Hodson received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has served as an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College and visiting professor with CSU, Sacramento and the University of Southern California. From 1978 to 1993, Dr. Hodson worked for the state Senate. He served as a member’s chief of staff, with the Senate Office of Research and a policy committee consultant. He was a key staffer in the passage of a series of legislative ethics measures in 1989-90. In 1990-92, as the staff director of the Senate Elections and Reapportionment Committee, he supervised the development of the Senate's redistricting plan which was widely noted for its openness and for receiving an unprecedented unanimous vote in the Senate.

Dr. Hodson was named the executive director of the Center for California Studies, CSUS in August 1993. Under his leadership, the Center has expanded its nationally known Capital Fellows Programs to include the Judicial Administration Fellowship program, one of the very few such programs in the nation; created the LegiSchool Project, an innovative high school civic education program incorporating television broadcasts of town hall meetings between students and legislators; training programs for newly elected county supervisors and state legislators; the California Election Data Archive, the state’s only statewide repository of local election data; Eureka! California’s Budget Balancer, a computerized simulation of the California budget process; and the Faculty Research Fellows Program which links the policy research needs of state policy makers with the resources of the California State University’s twenty-three campuses.

Dr. Hodson is widely regarded as an expert on California government and politics. He is frequently quoted in newspapers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times to the Times of London. He is the author of numerous articles on California government and politics including an article in the 2004 California Policy Issues Annual titled “History, Myth, and Political Instability in California.”