Current Research My research focuses primarily on the U.S. Congress. However, I involve myself in research projects on other topics, as well. More on my current research projects is discussed below: My Dissertation: Information Control: Leadership Power in the U.S. House of Representatives My dissertation, titled Information Control: Leadership Power in the U.S. House of Representatives, investigates the role information plays in the power and strategies of legislative leaders—-both party leaders and committee chairs-—in Congress. Most rank-and-file members of Congress lack the time and resources necessary to track, study, or become deeply involved in legislating on most bills considered by the House. As a result, they rely on sources that can synthesize the information they need to decide whether or not to support the bill, offer an amendment, or take other actions. The party leadership and committee chairs, because of their staff and resource advantages, are important sources of information for the rank-and-file. However, legislative leaders often exploit their informational advantages to help their preferred legislation gain easy passage through the chamber. Along with the ability to perpetually collect information on rank-and-file preferences, and provide leadership-approved information about legislation, legislative leaders also have an arsenal of tools to limit the availability of information to others including withholding legislative language, scheduling votes on short notice, and back- and front-loading the legislative agenda so that a crush of legislation is considered all at once at the start or the end of a legislative session. This information control puts leaders in the driver’s seat, allowing them to lead the chamber by shaping the information driving the debate on a bill. For leaders, the goal of information control strategies is to focus attentive, debate, and deliberations on the most palatable aspects of a piece of legislation. By limiting what information is out there, leaders cna minimize the risk of the minority party or other potential opponents from identifying controversial aspects of the bill, and exploiting them to either force changes to the substance of the legislation, or split the majority's vote coalition on the floor. My research finds that legislative leaders make use of information control strategies in support of party priority legislation and legislation with the potential for strong interest group influence. Despite decades of study of congressional leaders, political science has little understanding of what constitutes congressional leadership. In fact, most studies of leadership in Congress emphasize its limits, rather than what leaders actually can do. My dissertation begins to fill this gap. I use both rigorous quantitative analysis and elite interviews with Members of Congress and their staffs to test my theory. This mixed methods approach allows me to gain insights not possible through quantitative analysis alone. My dissertation as submitted to the University of Maryland in November 2011 can be downloaded in full here. I'm Your Puppet: Power, Prestige, and the House Committee on Rules w/ Jill L. Curry Highlighting the evolution of the House Committee on Rules, my co-author, Jill Curry, and I investigate the relationship between committee power and committee prestige in the House of Representatives. Since the 1970s, the power the Rules Committee has grown dramatically. Today, the Committee plays a large role in the legislative strategies of the House majority leadership, structuring floor consideration of bills and even altering the subtsance of those bills. Yet, despite this, we present evidence that the prestige of the Committee has been eroding since the 1980s. Most scholarship on committee prestige equates it with power. Yet if such a relationship between power and prestige existed, the Rules Committee should be the most prestigious committee in the chamber. We argue that by understanding the Rules Committee, we gain a better understanding of the relationship between power and prestige. Specifically, prestige is a function of individual autonomy in committee decision-making interacting with committee power. Analysis of committee rules in the House of Representatives suggest that the Committee on Rules has restricted the individual influence of rank-and-file members of the committee over the last few decades, which, along with the majority party leadership's control over the decisionmaking of the committee in general, has contributed to a decline in prestige. District Magnitude and State Legislative Elections w/ Paul S. Herrnson and Jeffrey Taylor My co-authors and I are currently investigating numerous topics regarding the influence of district magnitude (the number of seats elected from a legislative district) has on state legislative elections. Eleven American states make at least some use of multi-member districts (MMDs) to elect representatives to their state legislatures. But most of what we know about state legislative elections is compiled from studies of elections in single-member districts. We hope to fill this gap in the literature. Currently, we have two papers in the late stages of drafting. The first assesses the influence of district magnitude on the campaign fundraising behavior of state legislative candidates. We argue that increases in district magnitude increase the scarcity of campaign funds available to all candidates. As a result candidates in magnitudes with larger districts are able to raise less funds than their colleagues. As a result, they adapt their fundraising behavior to focus on develop unique and loyal financial consituencies. We use data from Maryland state legislative elections to test these claims. The Maryland House of Delegates elects some members from one-, two-, and three-member districts. This allows us to test the impact of district magnitude without having to compare across chambers, states, or political cultures. A version of this paper was presented at the 2011 MPSA Conference. The other paper assesses the influence of district magnitude on voter participation in state legislative elections. This study suggests that while the district magnitude of state legislative districts has little impact on overall turnout rates, it strongly increases the amount of undervoting. In other words, in large magnitude districts, a larger proportion of voters do not cast all the votes allows in their state legislative elections than in small magnitude districts. Furthermore, cannots placed higher in the ballot order in these elections, all else equal, receive larger percentages of the vote than candidates lower in the ballot order, suggesting many voters cast a single vote for someone on the ballot and move on. We use data from Maryland, Vermont, and New Hampshire (three states with variation in district magnitude within their legislatures) to test these claims.