As we have for the last three election cycles, the Department of Political Science is conducting another series of polls around the 2020 Iowa Caucuses. The Caucuses are a uniquely Iowan political event and provide an opportunity for Iowa Sta
One of the main areas of my research is the ways in which different types of attitude strength matter for voter decision-making. Attitude strength is a property of an attitude.
Understanding political campaigns is a foundational goal for political scientists. The development of new campaign techniques, especially the use of "micro-targeting" strategies, challenges the fundamental understanding of how presidential campaigns influence our democracy. Unfortunately, social science has not been able to keep up with these developments in campaign tactics. Many basic science questions in political science have been unanswerable due to their massive data collection and data processing needs.
The main idea in this research is that the meaning of an election is socially constructed. There may or may not be a signal or mandate in the election, but there isn’t an objective empirical way to determine whether or not this mandate is real.
In this project, we are exploring various facets of political interest. While interest is widely seen as an important predictor of political participation, we know much less about why people, either individual voters or the electorate as a w
My work on public opinion and elections is less unified than some of the other research streams. Much of this work is single articles on topics with co-authors, typically former graduate students and colleagues of mine.
I was the co-PI on the NSF funded REU on Wind Energy, Science, Engineering, and Policy, part of the Wind Energy Initiative at Iowa State. This project brought 10 students to ISU each summer for three years. They partnered with faculty
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.
One of the things I enjoyed about being editor of Political Behavior was been the ability to think about the editorial and peer review process. I have initiated several policies as editor about increasing the data accessibility and