Despite a long history of nonpartisanship, the Nebraska state legislature has polarized rapidly within the past decade. Using interviews and campaign finance records, we examine politics in the modern Unicam to investigate nonpartisan polarization. We find that newly-instituted term limits...

Surveys show majority U.S. support for a carbon tax. Yet none has been adopted. Why? We study two failed carbon tax initiatives in Washington State in 2016 and 2018. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that Washington's real-world campaigns reduced support by 20 percentage...

We find that income matters more in "red America" than in "blue America." In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference. In...

Since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, several attempts have been made to block its provisions in the states. Among these, ballot propositions challenging the individual mandate have occurred in five states, with four more scheduled for November 2012. We first...

Why do state legislators vote the way they do? Which influence is predominant: ideology, party, or public opinion? The implementation votes surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a unique setting to examine this question, as they make all three considerations highly salient. State...

Advocates of direct primaries argued that party nominees selected by voters should be more independent-minded than those hand-selected by party elites. We test this claim through a study of state legislative vacancy appointments, through which a small group of party activists is responsible for...

Can electoral reforms such as an independent redistricting commission and the top-two primary create conditions that lead to better legislative representation? We explore this question by presenting a new method for measuring a key indicator of representation – the congruence between a...

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand the role of political ideology in policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another’s experiences. Our two experiments, embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials, expose...