In my book Local Interests, I show which interest groups are most active in city politics and examine how they influence public policies, including policies on housing development and spending on the police. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

A 5- to 9-seat majority will be very hard for Mike Johnson to control. And it makes Dems the favorites to flip the House in 2026. The average midterm since WWII has resulted in the president's party losing 25 seats:

We have two (2!) jobs at GW, one in Political Science and one at SMPA. Both will be affiliated with Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics. SMPA job: gwu.jobs/postings/116060. Poli Sci job: gwu.jobs/postings/116106. Let me know if you've got questions!

In a democracy, when and where should majorities rule? And when should their powers ever be limited? Steve Levitsky and I propose a framework to think through these questions in a new piece in the January 2025 issue of 'Journal of Democracy' muse.jhu.edu/article/947880

Are Democratic leaders making cities more dangerous than Republicans? Trump + others have repeatedly made claims like this. New paper Science Advances w/ Chris Warshaw @daniel_b_jones Matthew Harvey shows that, in short, the answer is no.

It was fun talking with GW Arts & Sciences's Dean Wahlbeck about how public opinion and elections impact policy. gwtoday.gwu.edu/video-our-demo…

Huge body of academic evidence that moderate candidates do better in elections.

Just posted: newly available state legislator individual ideology estimates! Based on a decade plus of work with Nolan McCarty. New data covers 1993-2022, and now contains 28,987 state legislators. Let us know how you use our data! dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?…

Interesting that I’m not seeing takes that this will help Trump politically because 1) moving to the extremes will turn out his base and/or 2) economic reality doesn’t matter, only elite messaging about the economy. Makes you think.

Politicians and journalists on across the US political spectrum have argued that recent election results reflect a frustration with Democratic policies on crime in cities; but new research by Harvard University Professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and Professor Christopher

If we mapped state-level support for Trump's BBB, I'll bet it would look a lot like his efforts to repeal the Medicaid expansion of the ACA in 2017. David Broockman and I found that ACA repeal was underwater in every state: nytimes.com/2017/06/14/ups…

SCOTUS rulings in recent decades have allowed for greater variation in state level policy, mostly by allowing for more conservative state policy (e.g., Dobbs with abortion bans). The Skrmetti decision does the same, accelerating state policy polarization.

Large ideological policy moves tend to move public opinion and elections against the party in power vox.com/politics/41866…