A Brief Bio

Welcome! I am an Associate Professor of Government at Connecticut College, and a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. My subject matter expertise is in American elections, political participation, and election administration. Through the lens of American Political Development, I teach courses in campaigns, parties and elections, election administration, urban politics, democratic theory, and offer a standalone seminar on the subject of American Political Development itself.

My research is centered around a singular question: how does democracy sustain itself? With my formal training in American Political Development as foundation, I have considered the question of democratic resilience through a range methodological approaches within political science, including survey research, in-depth interviews, content analysis, and archival research. Appreciating that addressing this question extends beyond one field, more recently, I have expanded my theoretical approach to incorporate insight from disciplines outside of political science like complexity theory and evolutionary science.

Presently, I study what election administration in the United States can teach us about democratic resilience. My book project, The Right (To Know How) to Vote: Voter Education and Fractal Resilience in American Democracy, uses the historical emergence of voter education and outreach by the over 10,000 state and local electoral management bodies (EMBs) in the United States as a proof of concept for understanding how local actors strengthen democratic resilience in decentralized systems. It examines whether and how state and local EMBs bolster their communities’ resilience to mis- and dis-information campaigns through emergent voter education and outreach strategies, and how their coordinated response to these campaigns across shared information networks reverberate outward and cultivate democratic resilience across the broader system of American elections. This project develops the field of American Political Development by contributing a new concept of institutional change — fractal resilience—a form of simultaneous institutional change and maintenance that emerges not through top-down policy mandates or the strategic maneuvering of political actors around established institutional norms, but at the grassroots level through the values, ethics, and actions of local, interconnected actors serving as stewards of a democratic system.

Supporting my research are two additional empirical projects: the Election Official Communications Tracker, which systematically monitors the public communications of more than 1,600 state and local electoral management bodies across all fifty states and the U.S. territories, and The National Election Knowledge Survey, which measures what the public actually understands about how elections are administered in the United States, and evaluates strategies for closing gaps that leave voters vulnerable to misinformation.

My research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the Social Science Research Council, Public Agenda’s Democracy Renewal Project, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It appears in peer reviewed journals such as Political Communication, Policy Studies, Election Law Journal, American Politics Research, and has informed the work of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the New York State Board of Elections, the Voting System and Technical Oversight Program’s (VSTOP) Certificate Program in Election Administration, Technology, and Security (CEATS) , the Bipartisan Policy Center, and election administrators across the country through ongoing conferences, talks, and webinars.