Research
Research Interests
Legislative Politics, Political Communication, Networks, Causal Inference, Machine Learning, Field Experiment
Work in Progress
"Shared Issue Attention and Bipartisan Coordination" (Dissertation)
Abstract: For congressional mediation to function effectively, members must engage in social influence processes that facilitate bipartisan coordination. Drawing on House floor speeches from the 98th to 112th Congresses, I show that issue attention cannot be dismissed as mere partisan rhetoric. Instead, I systematically demonstrate that shared issue attention promotes bipartisan coordination in legislative voting. These coordination effects are identified while accounting for dynamic feedback and inferred while appropriately modeling the error structure of dyadic data. I further present evidence that members use speeches as instruments of adaptive coordination—especially when partisan pressure is high and when members are positioned to learn from focused, informative signals shared by their peers. Finally, I show that floor speeches can effectively counterbalance party influence, highlighting their role as a mechanism of informal legislative mediation.