About Me

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a Graduate Affiliate with the Center for Effective Lawmaking. Additionally, I am a Visiting Scholar within the Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab at the University of Notre Dame.

My research focuses on American legislative institutions, party conflict and compromise, state politics, representation, and computational methods for social science.

In my dissertation, From Campaigns to Governance: Exploring Bipartisanship in State Legislatures, I challenge the notion that insights from the U.S. House of Representatives alone can universally explain legislative functionality. I argue that bipartisanship is conditional on the institutional rules and procedures, as well as the partisan composition of legislatures. To empirically test my argument, I leverage variation in state legislative chambers to engage with questions related to bipartisanship in electoral arenas and legislative institutions.

Dissertation Highlights:

• Campaign Rhetoric: I analyze when first-time state legislative candidates campaign on bipartisanship using text analysis methods and subsequently evaluate their legislative behavior and effectiveness. This involves a novel dataset of campaign documents for 12,000 state legislators elected between 1968 and 2018.

• Bipartisan Lawmaking: I develop a chamber-level measure of bipartisan lawmaking for 94 legislative chambers from 2009 to 2018 and examine how rules, procedures, and norms affect cross-party collaboration.

• Majority Security and Bipartisanship: I study the impact of majority security on bipartisan lawmaking using a legislator-level bipartisan cosponsorship score for 24,327 legislator-term specific observations from 2009 to 2018.

To empirically evaluate bipartisan lawmaking, I introduce three novel measures: the Bipartisan Rhetoric Score, the Chamber Bipartisan Cosponsorship Score, and the Legislator Bipartisan Cosponsorship Score, supported by a Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) Small Grant Award.

Additional Research:

• LGBTQ Lawmakers and Effectiveness: In “I’m Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers” (with Jacob Lollis), we find that LGBTQ lawmakers, who face electoral discrimination, are 43% more effective than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.

• Legislative Professionalism and Public Opinion: “Cashing in on Capacity? Social Class and Attitudes Toward Professionalized Legislatures” (with Jacob M. Lollis, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Justin Kirkland) explores how citizens’ disapproval of professionalized legislatures stems from membership composition rather than capacity-building tools.

• Bipartisan Campaigning and Effectiveness: In “Bipartisan Campaigners Become Bipartisan Legislators and Effective Lawmakers” (with Craig Volden and Alan E. Wiseman), we demonstrate that candidates who campaign on bipartisan commitments follow through and become effective lawmakers.

As a member of the State Legislative Bill Text Team with the Center for Effective Lawmaking, I am involved in collecting bill introductions from 1987 to 2024. Using large language models, we aim to create issue-specific state legislative effectiveness scores for over 80,300 legislator-term specific observations.