I am a political scientist interested in how political parties, interest groups and citizen activists organize to nominate candidates, win elections and influence government policies. With Bruce Desmarais I published a recent paper on how party networks coordinate to support favorite candidates in congressional elections to help them win. Ongoing work explores how these network dynamics in the financing of elections affect the ideological polarization of political parties in the U.S.. I also am pursuing a future project with graduate student Matthew Denny to examine the potential dynamics of providing every citizen with a publicly-financed voucher that can be used to make contributions to candidates. Additional projects on the topic of political participation include the potential impact on turnout of providing a lottery ticket to any citizen who votes.
