Research in progress
Below are descriptions of some of my current projects. Published works are linked in my CV, as are working papers where available.
Minority Party Capacity in Congress. With Jim Curry
Building off articles published in the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Politics, in this book manuscript we develop and test a theory of the influence of the minority party in Congress.
While the majority party is certainly advantaged in lawmaking, prominent party theories pay relatively little attention to the minority party’s capacity to influence policy. Prominent theories suggest that when parties are more polarized, majority parties will be more likely to use their near monopoly over control of procedural institutions in Congress to functionally shut the minority party out of the legislative process. But this account does not fit with some facts about politics in Congress. For instance, during the period 1980-2010, even as partisan polarization increased substantially, the proportion of substantive bills receiving a vote in the House of Representatives that were introduced by a member of the minority party increased four-fold.
First, we seek to understand the influence of the minority party in Congress. While the majority party is certainly advantaged in lawmaking, exploring the limits to the majority’s advantages in Congress helps to illuminate when, how, and why the minority can influence legislation. We test how the majority party should, theoretically, use their agenda power to further party goals. Party theories assert that majority parties should keep bills from passing if they advantage the minority or muddle the majority’s credit claiming, but we find little-to-no evidence that these considerations shape the majority’s use of their agenda powers when we look beyond roll rates.
Having made the case for needing a greater understanding of minority party influence in Congress, we next develop our theory. We argue that minority party influence flows from three conditions. The minority must have the opportunity to influence legislative outcomes (e.g., from public opinion, majority party disunity, or bicameral policymaking), the cohesion to take advantage of their opportunities, and the motivation to engage in policymaking. To test our theory, we operationalize our theoretical constructs using an application of multidimensional scaling techniques and find that our theory helps predict both which bills become law and the substance of policy outcomes.
In addition to showing that our theory can predict actions taken on bills, we also demonstrate the influence of the minority party more explicitly on the substance of policy. Through a novel application of text-reuse methods, I am currently building a dataset of the sections of bills, with indicators for whether the text of each bill section was later reused in a bill that passed the chamber. This data will have many uses, including giving us purchase on how and when policy changes as it moves through the legislative process, and how the minority party influences this process.
Party Support and Legislative Behavior. With Hans Hassell
Theories of party behavior in elections tend to see parties as focused on either winning elections or creating an ideologically cohesive congressional delegation, but our current theoretical understanding of how parties prioritize these preferences when they are in conflict is lacking. We argue parties' goals in elections shift depending on their majority status in the legislature. The minority party has relatively less power in the legislature, so their primary concern is regaining the majority, while majority party leaders have relatively more leeway to worry about ideological cohesion.
We are interested in how these shifting goals affect the relationship between party support in primary elections and legislative behavior once in office. In prior work, we found a strong link between party support during elections and partisan-aligned legislative behaviors in the next Congress. The link was much stronger among majority party members, and this process directly contributes to partisan polarization in Congress. We are expanding this work to explore how party support affects additional behaviors that reflect the relationship between parties and their members, such as committee assignments, service behavior, and rhetoric on the campaign trail, in the legislature, and on social media.
The Heart of the Deal: The Social Psychology of Political Compromise. With David Barker and Christopher Jan Carman.
In this book manuscript, under contract with Oxford University Press, we examine the social psychology of political compromise. We suggest that compromise often comes from a certain kind of moral conviction—to charity, equality, unity, and other socially altruistic values. In other words, the art of the deal depends on the “heart” of the deal. Moreover, because those socially altruistic values (along with the “agreeable” personality trait and disposition of empathic concern that undergirds them to some extent) motivate ideological liberalism/progressivism to a greater degree than they do ideological conservatism, we posit that compromise comes more naturally to the average modern-day Democrat than it does to her Republican counterpart.
While this story is ultimately about policymakers, citizens are central to the plot. First, because all policymakers are also citizens, any general psychology of compromise should be evident among both groups. Second, if that psychology is indeed more common to Democrats than to Republicans, then candidates who value compromise should fare better in Democratic primaries than in Republican ones—affecting who initially makes it into office on each side of the aisle. Third, as those elected officials do their jobs, the ones who represent Democratic constituencies should feel disproportionate pressure to “work together,” while those who represent Republican constituencies should feel more pressure to fight.
Accordingly, we evaluate our theory by studying both citizens and elected officials. We begin with the former—focusing on how people want their own “side” to negotiate—before investigating the preferences, messaging strategies, and behavior of policymakers themselves. We draw upon evidence from surveys, randomized experiments, Twitter, and the U.S. Congressional record.
Do Actions Speak Louder than Words? How Parties Reward Loyal Speech and Voting Behavior. With Joshua Lerner and Shahryar Minhas
In studying how parties discipline and reward their members, scholars have relied mostly on voting and procedural behavior, as common wisdom holds that what members say is largely unconstrained by the party, allowing members to speak their minds without fear of retribution as long as they vote the party line. In this paper, we argue that while parties may strictly care more about how members vote, parties still have a vested interest in rewarding members whose statements conform to the party's preferred messages. We test this using a novel measure of how well each member's floor speeches fit with those of their party (speech fit) and a similar measure of voting fit computed from DW-NOMINATE scores in order to study how parties reward members for both statements and votes. We generate our measure of speech fit through a novel and flexible approach to treating legislative behaviors such as speech as networks. Using evidence from the 97th-108th United States Congresses, we find that parties do care about what their members say, and that parties comparably reward loyalty in statements and votes.
Elite Discourse in the United States. With Ryan DeTamble, Spencer Dorsey, Michael Heseltine, and Marcus Johnson
Pundits and public opinion both suggest that divisive rhetoric in public discourse is on the rise. But how prevalent are these trends among elected officials, and who is driving these changes, members of Congress or the public? We study these questions using novel measures of polarizing rhetoric and incivility derived from supervised machine learning methods applied to the millions of tweets sent by members of Congress. We also examine the lasting effect of Donald Trump on the state of elite political discourse in the US. Two papers from this project have been published, in Legislative Studies Quarterly and American Politics Research, and more are in progress.