Research Agenda

My research aims to provide insights into wicked problems, including environmental policy, health care policy, voting, and how institutions and behaviors in American politics at the federal level have generated downstream effects upon subnational policy efforts.

Selected Publications

For information on recent publications and/or works in progress, please submit an email inquiry. Here are abstract from a few previous works:

American Antipathy: Partisanship and the Decline of Political Empathy

Political parties in a polarized, unempathetic political climate often believe that they are losing ground and under some form of existential threat. These beliefs appear to do the emotional work of dehumanizing the other party and result in a loss of emotional and cognitive empathy. The purpose of this empirical study was to compare temporal changes in cross-party political empathy. Studying the period from 1980 to 2016, this study suggests that Americans who identified with a major party significantly reduced their empathy toward the other major party, with Chow breakpoint regression analysis identifying the mid-to-late 1990s as independent downward breakpoints for strong partisans of both parties. This finding was interpreted through Davies’ theory of revolutionary change and placed into the larger context of scholarly discussion pertaining to polarization.  

Institutional Gridlock in the United States Congress: Built-In Limitations vs. Modern Requirements

During the 1948 election, President Truman campaigned against the “Do Nothing Congress” that had passed a total of 906 bills. The 114th Congress, which ended January 3, 2017, enacted a paltry 329. Among a variety of factors, an increase in partisan or institutional gridlock has been cited as a significant cause of legislative stalemate. By demonstrating the close interconnections between polarization, game theory, and gridlock in a comprehensive discussion, this paper presents a synthesis of the most important empirical and the theoretical developments in the emerging consensus on gridlock. The author further suggests that the evolution of empirical studies on Congressional gridlock in the post-Mayhew era has diverted attention from the possibility that gridlock might be, in some sense, desirable. 

Systematic Failure: Mental Health Policy in the United States

The United States spends only 5.6 percent of its health care spending on mental health, and the associated problems tend to receive national attention primarily in the wake of mass shooting events. This policy aspect of mental health treatment appears to have faded from view in a relative way, and has devolved into a top-down and bottom-up failure. Government policy has been bifurcated between (a) paying private-sector actors such as pharmaceutical companies and hospitals to render outpatient treatment and (b) transferring de facto management of the mentally ill to prisons and municipal authorities. This paper contends that the ultimate reason for this devolution in mental health policy has been the successive failure of both institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, which in turn has reduced the policy scope that government can apply to the problem of mental health treatment. The reduction is best understood not as a single, simple reflection of either public opinion or political orientation, but as the result of a systematic, decades-long failure of two distinct policy approaches.