Current Research

            In the last five years, my research agenda has concentrated in three areas: political geography, political behavior and campaigns and elections.  My research in political behavior has involved the study of political geography and the analysis of contextual (local) effects on voting behavior and attitudes.  Most of my research in this area is aimed at showing what it means to say that “context” or “place” matters to political attitudes and behavior.   I am also in the forefront of efforts to apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to the study of politics and policy. 

Geographic Methods, Geographic Information Systems and Political Behavior

            Joined by my colleague Wendy Cho (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), we are using new geographic analysis tools to investigate the spatial distribution of campaign contributors and volunteers to political parties and candidates.   We are leading a new investigation that will use flow maps to show patterns of cross-state voter mobility and the redistribution of the electorate through migration.   We are advancing the application of new methodologies for the exploration of a variety of political phenomenon.

            With Scott Althaus (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), the nation’s leading media and politics scholar, we are studying the geography of media use in the United States, contrasting locations of high internet and talk radio consumption, for example, with areas of greater cable television and broadcast network utilization.  Not everyone reads the same newspaper, listens to the same radio programming, or watches the same broadcast television stations.  New viewers become attracted to the medium, while others tire of it and turn away, a process referred to as audience turnover.   Just as media audiences vary over very short periods of time, so too must they vary across space.   With that in mind, How do varieties of media use vary across the geographic terrain of the nation?  And might the local variability in the preference for news sources contribute to the differentiation of the mass public both with respect to political knowledge and political preference?

The Geography of Campaign Contributing and Donor Networks in the United States

            Joined by my colleague Frances Lee (University of Maryland), we are studying the geographic origins of individual campaign contributions to the Republican and Democratic Parties and their candidates over the last decade.  In one recent paper, we use flow-mapping to display patterns of campaign giving across congressional districts.  Our goal in this project is to analyze relations of monetary surrogacy in congressional elections.  By “monetary surrogacy” we mean the financial ties between candidates running for Congress and individual donors who reside outside those candidates’ districts.  An important conclusion from this research is that surrogate representation has a territorial bias – as out-of-district contributions do not originate from a random set of locations.  Relations of monetary surrogacy are not “non-territorial.”  Contributions come from people living in particular places and not others.  Some parts of the country enjoy very dense ties of monetary surrogacy with congressional representatives; whereas most places have only thin ties—or none at all—an important fact that the previous literature has left unexplored.

Other Research in Progress

            Understanding Rural Politics is a book in progress aimed at understanding the foundation of political attitudes and behavior in rural areas, the “red” states, and the “red” areas of “blue” states.    Rural communities in the United States are alleged by social capital theorists to be superior to urban and suburban communities at socializing residents into the norms and practices of democratic citizenship. At the same time, journalism, joined by social science research, often characterizes the rural population as racially prejudiced, intolerant, backward, and generally hostile to liberal political values.  Can these very contrary characterizations be reconciled?   Is one of these descriptions just flat wrong?   This book probes the neglected rural population to examine variation internal to it, and also ask important questions about the production of social capital and the reaction to ethnic diversity in rural immigrant-receiving areas.  The empirical base is varied, and the project deploys multiple methodological strategies. 

            Field Experiments in Campaign Politics includes two papers coauthored with Donald Green (Yale University), Alan Gerber (Yale University) and Daron R. Shaw (University of Texas, Austin), based on a variety of field experiments carried out on media outreach to voters, fundraising and GOTV efforts in recent elections.     

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