Research Agenda

My research focuses on two broad areas: legislative institutions and political methodology.  My current research (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler) explores how personality and ideology come together to shape legislative behavior. We have developed the first-ever estimates of legislator personality over time and show how these predict a wide range of legislative behavior. This project is an inherently interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing insight from political science, psychology, experimental economics, and machine learning.

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 projects include an experimental study on the effects of valence factors on candidate evaluations (co-authored with Jonathan Klingler and Gary Hollibaugh), a project unifying survey and roll call approaches to the study of legislator-voter ideological matching, and a paper on measuring the effects of party loyalty on committee assignments (with Nicole Asmussen).

Book​

More than a Feeling: Personality, Polarization, and the Transformation of the U.S. Congress (with Jonathan Klingler and Gary Hollibaugh). Published by the University of Chicago Press ​in April 2017. Buy it here.​

Published Papers

What I Like About You: Legislator Personality and Legislator Approval  (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler; Forthcoming at Political Behavior)

Don't Know What You Got? A Bayesian Hierarchical Model of Neuroticism and Nonresponse (with Jonathan Klingler and Gary Hollibaugh; Forthcoming at Political Science Research & Methods)

Talking Heads: Measuring Elite Personality Using Speech (with Jonathan Klingler and Gary Hollibaugh; Forthcoming at Political Science Research & Methods)
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When Loyalty Tested: Do Party Leaders Use Committee Assignments as Rewards? 2018. Congress & The Presidency 45(1): 41-65 (with Nicole Asmussen)
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Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Crowdsourced Ideal Point Estimation. 2016. Journal of Politics 78 (1), 281-295.

Weighing the Alternatives: Preferences, Parties, and Constituency in Roll Call Voting. 2015. Journal of Politics 77 (2), 421-432.

Bringing the Minority Back to the Party: A Theory of Majority and Minority Parties in Congress. 2014. Journal of Theoretical Politics 27 (1): 132-150.

National Survival and the Confederate Congress. 2013. Historical Methods 46 (1): 31-40.

Working Papers​

Welcome to the Machine (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler; Under Review)

Will I stay or Will I Go? Conscientiousness and Lame Duck Absenteeism (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler)

         Press:
              - A piece by me summarizing the work by me at the Washington Post Monkey Cage
              - Andrew Prokop's write-up over at Vox on the paper
              - Jonathan Bernstein's link at Bloomberg  

The Tangled Web of Policy Support: Foundations and Environmental NGOs (with Larry Rothenberg; Under Revision) 

A Sense of His Soul: Candidate Imagery, Signaling and Voting Intent (with Gary Hollibaugh and Jonathan Klingler; Under Revision)

Filibusted: The Mixed Effects of "Going Nuclear" (Under Review)

Measuring Party Effects