Research Agenda

My research agenda centers around how American political elites, such as candidates for office or interest groups, publicly communicate, with a focus on their use of new technologies like social media. I also study fundraising by political campaigns. My work has been published at Electoral Studies, Social Media + Society, Social Science Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, the Journal of Law & Courts, the Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy, and the Journal of Quantitative Description.

I incorporate aspects of both political behavior and political institutions in my work, using big data and modern machine learning methods. Though my main area of substantive focus is congressional campaigns, I have also applied these approaches to political communication by other political actors such as interest groups and police departments. At best, these new technologies may lower the barrier for entry into the political process; at worst, they incentivize more polarizing rhetoric and negative sentiment. My goal in studying political communication is twofold. First, I use social media data to test long-standing questions in political science research. Second, I seek to understand how the impact of who a political audience is, combined with the means of communicating, affects how elite political actors behave and what issues they emphasize.

It has recently become more difficult to access social media data, and therefore to study political elites. In response to this, I am a part of an interdisciplinary team working to collect handles and posts of federal primary candidates and sitting state legislators across several social media platforms and make them publicly available for scholars, journalists, and non-profits. Our project is called Candidata. Read more at https://www.candidata24.org/ and download handles and social media posts by 2024 federal primary candidates across 10 social media platforms here: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/somar/view/studies/300490.

select works in progress

Small Dollar Donations and Globalization: How Trade-Related Layoffs Translate to Costly Political Action(with Jim Bisbee, Megan A. Brown, Patrick Y. Wu, and Rachel Porter).

The correlation between free trade's negative consequences and political outcomes in the United States has received a lot of scholarly attention over the last decade. A persistent empirical challenge across this work has been the ecological inference challenge, in which empirical evidence aggregated to geographic units is used to infer behaviors of interest theorized at the individual level. Efforts to overcome this limitation that use survey self-reports of public opinion are marred by the preponderant influence of partisanship on these responses. In this project, we exploit a rich new dataset of individual-level small dollar donations to ActBlue and WinRed to causally identify the true effect of free trade's negative labor market outcomes on costly political behavior. We implement recent methodological innovations in generalized difference-in-differences estimation to compare donor behavior before and after highly salient mass layoffs occur, relative to the change in donation behavior of otherwise similar donors living in otherwise similar areas that did not witness these layoffs. We show that trade-related layoffs stimulate political participation through small dollar donations, but that the main beneficiaries of this increased political participation are conservative groups and candidates. By providing a carefully identified estimate of a costly political behavior using rich data, we contribute more convincing evidence of a political response to free trade's negative consequences in the United States.

Why are Politicians so Bad at YouTube? (with Megan A. Brown, Cody Buntain, and Josephine Lukito).

We seek to understand the ways in which American politicians are (and are not) using YouTube. YouTube is the most commonly used platform among Americans (Pew Research Center 2024), and yet politicians do not make widespread or effective use of the platform. We find that 2024 House primary campaigns were less likely to have accounts compared to other platforms like Twitter/X or Facebook, when they did have accounts they posted relatively rarely, and their videos rarely received meaningful engagement. In a cluster analysis of video thumbnails, we find that the vast majority of videos on campaign YouTube accounts are not native content, but instead video content that the campaign seems to be storing on their pages-- media coverage, floor speeches, and other events. Finally, in preliminary analysis of cross-platform spread, we show that while YouTube videos are shared across platforms, it isn't a universal phenomenon.

“Oh, I Leave Quite an Impression”: How Women in the Senate Build Digital Networks (with Laura Moses, Annelise Russell, and Sean Theriault)

The rise in the number of women senators has coincided with the increasing importance of digital platforms like Twitter/X in shaping political communication, self-presentation, and collaboration. While the Senate remains male-dominated, female senators are among the most active users of social media, leveraging platforms to build networks, reinforce political narratives, and influence the legislative agenda. This paper examines how U.S. senators, particularly women, use social media to establish themselves as connected political actors. Drawing on six years of data, we explore the mentions and sentiment of messages to evaluate the dynamics, relationships, and behaviors of female senators in the digital social sphere. We find that they are more likely to build connections on Twitter/X — seeking larger digital audiences through shared advertising. In navigating gendered expectations, they foster a digital network that emphasizes cooperation and collective accomplishments. These insights reveal how gender shapes legislative dynamics in Congress and contribute to broader discussions of representation, political branding, and the structure of digital communications in which members operate.

The Democratizing and Polarizing Impact of Fundraising on Twitter: Easy Money, Viral Incentives, and the Catalyzing Role of Mainstream Media (with Joshua A. Tucker and Jonathan Nagler)

What is the effect of social media on campaign fundraising? We propose two pathways through which campaigns can raise money through their tweets: directly via Twitter users seeing their tweets and indirectly through retweets by media and journalists, who spread a campaign's message beyond the users who would have otherwise seen the tweet. Previous work suggests that a main audience for campaigns on Twitter are journalists and the media. However, we do not know the extent to which this is true, or for which candidates. We find that on the days congressional campaigns received more retweets, they also received more contributions. Further, we find that hundreds of campaigns were retweeted thousands of times by national news media and receive higher predicted contributions than when they were not. This difference is largest when the campaigns tweeted about nationally salient and polarizing topics such as Donald Trump or abortion-- overall, and separately for candidates in safe and competitive seats and for incumbents and non-incumbents. Campaigns in competitive seats and non-incumbents further receive higher predicted contributions when they do not tweet about nationally salient topics and are retweeted by local news media. Our results suggest that Twitter can offer campaigns a pathway to build up resources and support nationwide, mediated by the traditional news media, but incentivizes politicians to tweet about nationally polarizing and salient topics to gain media coverage and appeal to national, partisan individuals.

Do Small Donors Make a Big Difference in U.S. Elections?: Evidence from 50 Million Campaign Contributions (with Rachel Porter and Megan A. Brown)

This paper leverages 50 million small and large contributions to 2020 and 2022 House campaigns, linked to a national voter file and geolocated to the donor's congressional district. With these data, we examine three common claims about small donors and their impact: whether they 1) diversify the donorate, 2) provide a viable fundraising base under small-dollar matching programs, and 3) direct seed funding to extreme candidates, propelling them to office. We find that while small donors do diversify the donorate, their share of the contribution pool is so minimal it may not amplify the voices of the underrepresented. We also show that some small donor matching programs improve candidates' fundraising potential, but less than a third of candidates meet eligibility requirements. Importantly, public financing programs that only match constituent contributions do not elevate candidate fundraising. Finally, contrary to conventional wisdom, we demonstrate that small contributions are unlikely to propel extreme candidates into office. We hope our analyses provide context for researchers and public policy experts navigating the nuances of campaign finance reform.