Carmines has published widely in the major journals of his discipline, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. He is the coauthor of six books, two of which — Issue Evolution: Race and Transformation of American Politics, with James A. Stimson (Princeton University Press, 1992), and Reaching Beyond Race, with Paul M. Sniderman (Harvard University Press, 1997) — won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of U.S. national policy. In 2012, Issue Evolution was awarded the Philip E. Converse Award from the American Political Science Association for an outstanding and influential book published in the past five years. Four of Carmines papers presented at academic conferences have won outstanding paper awards, including the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award, the Pi Sigma Alpha Award, and the Chastain Award.
Carmines has served as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and as a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. In 1987, he was awarded the AMOCO Award for Distinguished Teaching from IU. He chaired the Department of Political Science at IU for seven years, from 1990 to 1997.
Professor Carmines is currently working on three major research projects: one with Michael Ensley and Michael Wagner that examines how the American public has responded to partisan polarization; a second with Michael Wagner and Jessica Gerrity focusing on public evaluations of Congress; and a third with J. Merrill Shanks, Henry Brady, and Douglas Strand that examines the role that voters’ policy preferences have played in their electoral decisions in recent presidential and congressional elections.
Carmines is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a past president of the Midwest Political Science Association.