“My job here is to talk, to report on the state of our affairs, and it is the job of the legislature and assembled audience to listen. If, by chance, you finish before I do, please let me know.”
My Dissertation
The relationship President Obama shared with Congress was contentious, to say the least. While much of the contention has been attributed to polarization, there are a wealth of additional factors that may have influenced his legislative successes. Unfortunately, much of the literature on interbranch relationships has focused on the role of partisanship and divided government. This is not surprising as 1) polarization and partisanship have only grown in Washington and 2) it is difficult to gain suitable leverage over this question as so few people have served as president, particularly in the Modern Era. If we turn to the states – our “laboratories of democracy” –we can then begin to develop broader theories that explain executive-legislative relationships. State politics scholars have concluded that, similar to the president, “governors are the most central and visible individual actors influencing state policy.” Like presidents, governors’ power to recommend legislation allows them to shape the larger policy agenda of their time in office. Governors and their legislatures, then, are a perfect avenue for testing some of the central questions surrounding interbranch relationships that a study at the federal level simply cannot answer. Using an original dataset of gubernatorial agendas and legislative successes spanning two decades, I consider political skill, institutional structure, and socio-demographic factors as potential contributors to a governor’s success. I find that gender nor previous legislative experience influence a governor’s success. It is the institutional structure of the legislature that plays the greatest role in the success of a governor’s policy agenda.
Other Work
Nice Girls? Sex, Collegiality, and Bipartisan Cooperation in the U.S. Congress with Jennifer Lawless and Sean Theriault.
When women in Congress solve a high-profile problem, their colleagues and the media praise their ability to get Washington’s business done by collaborating and compromising in a way that men do not. The problem with this popularly held view is that it is entirely anecdotal. In assembling several new data sets to test this proposition systematically, we find that women are more likely than men to participate in the kinds of activities that foster collegiality. But we uncover almost no evidence that women’s legislative behavior on fact-finding abroad, cosponsoring legislation, or engaging the legislative process differs from men’s. The partisan divide that now characterizes the legislative process creates strong disincentives for women (and men) to engage in bipartisan problem solving. To be sure, women’s presence in Congress promotes democratic legitimacy, but it does little to reduce gridlock and stalemate on Capitol Hill.