Most of my work focuses on national elections and politics. I have written several papers, however, that rely on the differences across the states for leverage to test important questions about politics.
In a new project with several people in Computer Science, we are working on developing automated tools for classifying the tweets of state legislators in to the measurement system developed by the Policy Agendas Project. With these data, we test several theories about why states choose to focus on certain elements of the policy agenda space.
In two papers written with Paul Djupe (“The Impact of Negative Campaigning: Evidence from the 1998 Senatorial Primaries” and “When Primary Campaigns Go Negative: The Determinants of Campaign Negativity”) we content analyze coverage of the campaigns to determine if and when primary campaigns will attack their opponents. Thus, we rely on an actual measure of how negative the campaign is instead of relying on the closeness of the results as with the previous literature. In the first paper we show that negativity has no real effect on general election outcomes. In the second, we show that the decision to go negative depends on expected closeness of the campaign and the dynamics of the race.
Larry Grossback and I wrote one paper on the nature of state legislative staff (“Understanding Institutional Change: Legislative Staff Developments and the State Policymaking Environment.”) Our argument is that state legislative staff play a key role in the legislative process and enable states to propose and pass more legislation.
The policy diffusion literature emphasizes how states learn about policies from one another. In “Ideology and Learning in Policy Diffusion” (co-authored with Sean Nicholson-Crotty and Larry Grossback), we show that one key element to this learning is taking cues from the ideological positions of the states that have passed legislation. We show that a state is more likely to adopt a policy if the previous adopters (either other states or the federal government) are more ideologically similar to the state in question.
Finally, Chris Gilbert and I have published a series of book chapters on the role of the religious right in Minnesota’s elections. These are part of a series of books that examine how the religious right influenced the parties from 1994 until 2000.