Greetings
I am a sixth year graduate student in political science at Duke University. I study American Government, specifically political behavior, voting, campaigns, and elections. My curriculum vitae is here.
Research & Papers
For information about my research interests and papers that I have worked on, please click here. A copy of my article in Electoral Studies with John Aldrich is here. A copy of my article in Political Behavior with Paul Abramson, John Aldrich, and Dave Rohde is here. Please contact me if you would prefer the typeset version (in .pdf) of either article.
Dissertation
My dissertation, Learning Curves: Three Studies on Political Information Acquisition, is a collection of three articles addressing normatively important questions about the effects of political information on public opinion, political participation, and electoral outcomes. I focus on the different ways that people acquire and incorporate information based on their levels of political knowledge and attentiveness. These related projects utilize very different methodologies to address the consequences of political information in contemporary politics. My first chapter asks, What campaign information matters? Which campaign events are actually informative? I develop a new measure of information flow using data from a political prediction market and a Bayesian estimation technique that adapts models from the economics literature. This measure offers a reliable way to describe the importance of campaign events that does not suffer from either post hoc judgments or reports from the principals involved in the campaign. My second chapter looks at the online social networks of college students and asks, How does the information that students 'incidentally' encounter in electronic social networks shape their political knowledge? This chapter combines survey methodology with an experiment testing source credibility to document the occurrence of this phenomenon and suggest a causal mechanism. The third chapter asks, Do candidate visits affect issue salience, public opinion, and ultimately vote choice? I link survey data with the location and topics of all speeches given by George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004 to empirically test the conventional wisdom that candidate appearances change electoral outcomes. These projects investigate the pathways of information acquisition and its effects among three groups whom we would expect to learn differently: the attentive experts, the potentially interested who possess some, but not much, knowledge, and those people with little knowledge or interest in politics.
For a more detailed description, please click here.
Teaching
My statement of teaching philosophy is here. The syllabus for the class I developed and taught this past spring semester, "Analyzing Election 2006", is here. The syllabus for "Scandal and Reform in American Politics", the course I taught during the Spring 2006 semester, is here.
For more information, please go to my Teaching web page.