I study how political elites use communication to work within institutional constraints, represent their constituents, and influence public discourse. My work contributes to three key subfields: legislative studies, political communication, and representation, examining how institutional design and partisan context shape rhetorical strategies as well as how those strategies affect policy debates and public views of democratic governance. While my primary focus is the U.S. Congress, I also conduct comparative work in British politics, using cases such as parliamentary questioning and legislator's responses to racial justice protests to explore how similar dynamics play out in different institutional and national contexts. This cross-national approach allows me to identify both the features of elite communication that are institution-specific and those that travel across political systems.
My dissertation, Talking About Blocking: How Senators Discuss Filibustering, investigates how U.S. senators frame the filibuster in their public communications. While scholars have extensively examined the filibuster as a procedural tool, its rhetorical use is far less understood. In a polarized, media-driven environment, senators increasingly use messaging not only to explain inaction but sometimes as a substitute for legislative action. Procedural battles have heightened the symbolic stakes of obstruction, making filibuster rhetoric a potential source of political power. Drawing on a large dataset of Senate press releases from 2005 to 2024, I examine how senators frame the filibuster and how those frames vary by party, context, and time.
Claiming and Blaming: How Minority Party Status Shapes Filibuster Framing in the U.S. Senate | Article Text
Job Market Paper; Legislative Studies Quarterly
Abstract: Why do senators choose to talk about filibustering, a tool widely associated with obstruction and gridlock? This paper examines how senators strategically reference filibustering in official communications, focusing on two rhetorical frames: credit-claiming and blaming. Using an original dataset of Senate press releases from the 109th through 118th Congresses, I evaluate when and how senators utilize these frames. I show that minority party senators are more likely to claim credit for obstruction, while majority party senators are more likely to assign blame to the opposition. These patterns align with theories positioning the filibuster as both a tool of resistance and a symbol of dysfunction. Over time, credit-claiming rhetoric has declined, while evidence for increased blaming is mixed. While factors like ideological extremity shape some messaging, minority party status remains the most consistent driver. Filibuster rhetoric serves as a strategic tool for managing reputations, shifting blame, and appealing to varied audiences.
“To Scrutinise and Protect: Question Time as a Window into Institutional and Electoral Incentives at Holyrood and Westminster”. 2020. Parliamentary Affairs. | Article Text
With David C.W. Parker (Montana State University), and Caitlyn M. Richter
Abstract: Question Time is subject to problems of collective action and coordination. Individual parliamentarians seeking to build a personal vote are not incentivised to participate, despite the fact that the collective party brand affecting re-election is at risk during these highly publicised weekly spectacles. We analyse questions asked at First Minister’s Question Time during the first four sessions of the Scottish Parliament to examine the factors predicting whether and how parliamentarians chose to participate in oversight of the government. Despite the varied incentives provided by the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system, the total number of questions asked and the tone of those questions is largely a function of whether the Member of Scottish Parliament (MSP) is serving in the governing party or not.
Words and Deeds: Do Legislators' Public Messages Reflect Their Behind-the-Scenes Work with Federal Agencies? | Article Text
With Devin Judge-Lord (University of Michigan), Rochelle Snyder (Coe College) and Eleanor Powell (UW-Madison)
Abstract: Do legislators’ words match their deeds? We introduce “attention consistency” as a measure of representation, theorize conditions that should produce more consistency between public messaging and behavior in office, and test whether legislators’ public attention to federal agencies in constituent newsletters corresponds to their private engagement with those agencies. We find strong evidence of attention consistency in cross-sectional and within-member analyses. Robustness checks evaluating the relative distribution of legislator attention across agencies yield similar results. Legislators who publicly emphasize an agency engage more with that agency behind the scenes. We find no evidence that ideological distance from an agency conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Similarly, while members of relevant oversight committees make more requests of agencies they oversee, we find no evidence that oversight membership conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Our analyses show that legislators’ interests, as expressed in their attention to that agency in their newsletters, matter as much as institutional roles in shaping legislators’ behind-the-scenes interactions with federal agencies.
Football, #BlackLivesMatter, and #ThreeLions: What the 2021 Euro Championship Tells Us about the Politics of Race, Place-based Resentment, and the Representational Styles of English MPs | Article Text
With David C.W. Parker (UW-Platteville), Stran Knudson (MSU Undergraduate), Mesa McKee (MSU Undergraduate), and Heba Haq (UW-Madison Undergraduate)
Abstract: Members of the English football team expressed their support for racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement by taking a knee during the Euro championship this summer—and were subjected to expressions of crowd disapproval, negative commentary from government ministers, and racist online abuse after losing to Italy in the finals. We explore in this paper how English MPs addressed the kneeling of the English team and the subsequent racist abuse faced by English players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukaya Saka as a window into the politics of place-based (Cramer, 2016; Goodhart, 2017) and racial resentment in British politics. Many scholars have used social media to gauge the representational styles and position-taking of legislators (e.g. Silva and Proksch, 2021). We gathered data on the twitter feeds of English MPs for six weeks this summer to analyse the positions they took on the controversy. We anticipate that MPs representing less racially diverse and more deprived constituencies were less likely to make note of the controversy on social media. We expect that MPs representing Red Wall constituencies—whether Labour or Conservative—to be particularly unlikely to express support for the targeted players when compared to their colleagues. We conclude by considering how the politics of place, the rise of the culture wars, and identity conflicts (Sobolweska and Ford, 2020) in British politics create representational dilemmas within both the Conservative and Labour Parties in England.
Filibuster as Foil: How Senators Position Themselves on the Filibuster
Description: This paper examines how senators frame appeals for or against the filibuster as an institution and how that messaging shifts across their Senate careers. Rather than focusing solely on partisan opponents, senators often position themselves in relation to the filibuster itself, defending it, advocating reform, supporting narrow exceptions, or calling for full elimination.
The Vertical Politics of Misinformation: Election Narratives in Congress and State Legislatures
With SoRelle Gaynor (University of Virginia) and Jess Esplin (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Abstract: This paper examines the diffusion of election misinformation across federal and state legislative institutions following the 2020 election and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Combining computational text analysis, network analysis, and state-level case studies, we assess how institutional relationships shape patterns of rhetorical similarity among lawmakers, and find that the spread of election denialism is strongly structured by institutional boundaries, with diffusion occurring primarily within, rather than across, chambers. While there is some evidence of horizontal diffusion among state legislators, cross-level transmission between federal and state actors is rare. These patterns appear to be driven by differences in message content: state legislators emphasize chamber-specific and locally salient issues, whereas members of Congress advance more polarized, nationalized narratives. Together, these findings highlight the importance of institutional context in structuring political communication and constrainexpectations about the extent of cross-level message diffusion.
Evaluating Public Responses to Filibuster Messaging
Description: This paper tests how exposure to filibuster messaging affects public evaluations of obstruction and the senators discussing it, using a survey experiment focused on credit-claiming and blame.
Calling for Boris Johnson’s Resignation Survival Analysis
With David C.W. Parker (University of Wisconsin - Platteville)
Description: Survival analysis of how long it took Conservative MPs to call for Boris Johnson’s resignation following party scandals, using the case to examine strategic silence and intraparty dynamics.