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Professional
Bio
I am an assistant professor of in the Department of Government at American University, Research Director for
the Center for Congressional and
Presidential Studies, and Co-Editor of Congress & the
Presidency. My research interests bridge the fields of
political communication, political behavior, and parties. My work has appeared in the American Political Science Review,
the American Journal of Political
Science, Political Research
Quarterly, Legislative Studies
Quarterly, and Political
Communication, among other journals.
Currently, I am investigating a variety of questions related to
political behavior. I am co-editing a manuscript on issue framing titled Framing Debates. The contributions
to the anthology are papers that were presented at a conference that
I hosted at American
University in June.
The contributors to this volume discuss how the framing of ideas and
issues permeate and shape contemporary politics, as well as address
debates over how to conceptualize and analyze issue framing.
I am also beginning a new project examining how priming citizens to
think about risk affects how they think about various political issues. How
citizens deal with risk is important because political decisions are
inherently uncertain. Yet, when asked to make a choice between two
competing policies or candidates, citizens are often not presented with
information about the risks involved in either choice and, therefore, do
not properly consider the risks involved in the decision. We expect that
when citizens are presented with information about the risks of taking
particular actions, their preferences will change, becoming risk seeking
in some instances, and risk averse in others. Because of the weight
politicians give to public opinion in justifying their policy choices,
these findings have important consequences. For example, on the rare
occasion when opinion polls primed citizens to consider the risk of
American casualties involved in taking military action against Iraq,
support for such action diminished significantly, possibly providing a
more complete picture of public opinion on that crucial issue.
 My
research on political parties has primarily addressed the importance of
political parties in our political system by utilizing quasi-experimental
designs comparing partisan and nonpartisan environments. For example, in an article I coauthored
with Gerald Wright in the American Political Science Review, we
address the debate over party influence in legislatures and find that
parties are critical for structuring the low dimensional conflict that is
central to American politics. In
legislatures without active parties, conflict is largely unstructured and
accountability suffers. In addition, articles in Political Research
Quarterly and Public Opinion Quarterly demonstrate that
citizens are less likely to participate in an election when party labels
are absent from the ballot; those who do participate are more likely to
vote for incumbents or candidates with familiar names.
I am also the co-author of the 6th edition of Politics, Parties,
and Elections in America
(Thomson-Wadsworth).
I received my BA from the University
of Georgia and my PhD from Indiana University.
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