Current Research
My current research agenda focuses on several questions: 1) I am currently working on a larger book project examining voting rights at the intersection of race, class and gender in a comparative perspective; 2) I have two projects examining women's political leadership. With Ash Elswick, Megan Kennedy, and Erica Dollhopf I am examining gender differences in the employment life course of social movement organizational leaders. With Donna Bahry, I am researching how gender affects whether a national leader will run for reelection and when they win that election; 3) with John McCarthy, Chris Fowler, Dane Mataic, and I have a project on the maintenance of voter rolls and as part of this project have also explored how different polling locations affect voter turnout (with Nathaniel Fleming), and 4) I am currently working on a piece about the use of archival research in studying feminist institutions.
For a current copy of my CV, click here, and for my Google citation page click here.
Projects in Progress
Molding the Electorate: How Politicians Advance Voting Rights for some while Disenfranchising Others
Unanticipated Social Consequences of Routine Voter Maintenance for the Electorate (with Chris Fowler, John McCarthy, and Dane Mataic)
Insider activism and Leadership of Social Movement Organizations (with Erica Dollhopf and Megan Kennedy)
Women Political Leaders (with Donna Bahry)
Familiarity with Polling Place Locations and Voter Turnout in Pennsylvania (with Nathaniel Flemming)
Learning Protest (With Valerie Li, Shan-Jan Sarah Liu and Burcin Tamer) (Supported with a grant from the Spencer Foundation)
This book manuscript utilizes an intersectional analysis of voting rights across gender, race/ethnicity, and economic lines in the Australia, Canada and the United States. I argue that political elites simultaneously combine both extensions and retractions of the franchise among multiple groups to carve out a specific electorate that will provide for their reelection. By molding voting rights across multiple types of groups, elected officials can create an electorate that is more likely to support them. Thus, disenfranchising some groups while enfranchising others helps those in power remain in power by allowing them to determine the new electorate..
The purging of voter rolls and inequalities in registration are increasingly an area of public interest with some states moving towards more restricted voting laws while adopting automatic voter registration. Understanding how politics affects the definition of voter rolls, particularly the degree to which institutions and partisan control affect inequalities in voter rolls is important for understanding the functioning of the American democracy.
This project uses original data collection on organizations in the United States and their leaders to examine whether social movement organizations benefit from having had leaders who have served in government and the degree to which leaders in social movement organizations may end up serving afterward in government institutions.
Using an original dataset of political leaders exit from office, this project examines the trajectory of women leaders careers after ascending to office focusing on their reelection.
In this paper we explore whether general information about different locations and specific knowledge that results from personal connections to particular types of polling locations – churches, government buildings, and schools –affects voter turnout.
This project uses cross-national surveys of young peoples, including a natural experiment in the U.K., to examine how youth attitudes are affected by the use of protest. The project asks how does a nation’s political context – specifically the amount and form of protest – influence young citizens’ civic attitudes?
