Research Agenda
My research focuses on two broad areas: legislative institutions and political methodology. My current research explores the linkages between partisan institutional arrangements in legislatures and legislative voting behavior. Specifically, I am interested in how theories of partisan influences on lawmaking shape the complex decision processes of legislators. At the moment, I am working on an estimation procedure that allows scholars to disentangle the partisan and electoral effects on legislators' voting records.
Additionally, I am working on a number of collaborative projects. The first of these is with Lawrence Rothenberg, in which we analyze the donation behavior of nonprofit foundations to environmental NGOs. Using social network analysis and zero-inflated log-normal utility threshold item response models, we are able to disentangle the motivations behind foundation giving and NGO adaptation. The other project includes a Facebook application for matching voters and legislators in a common ideological space, an experimental study on the effects of valence factors on candidate evaluations (co-authored with Jonathan Klingler and Gary Hollibaugh), and a project unifying survey and roll call approaches to the study of legislator-voter ideological matching.
Publications
Working Papers
Bringing the Minority Back to the Party: A Theory of Majority and Minority Parties in Congress (Under Review)
Weighing the Alternatives: Preferences, Parties, and Constituency in Roll Call Voting (Under Review)
Missing in Action: A Bayesian Hierarchical Model of NA/DK Responses in Surveys (Under Review)
The Tangled Web of Policy Support: Foundations and Environmental NGOs (with Larry Rothenberg)
A Sense of His Soul: Candidate Imagery, Signaling and Voting Intent (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler; Under Review)
When Loyalty Tested: Do Party Leaders Use Committee Assignments as Rewards? (with Nicole Asmussen; Under Revision)
A World without the Filibuster: Alas, More of the Same
Filibusted: The Role of Generational Differences in Obstructionist Behavior in the U.S. Senate
Measuring Legislator and Voter Ideology: Unifying Survey and Roll Call Methodologies
Is the Majority Party Just and Interest Group?
