Areas of Focus
My past work, including my dissertation, focused on the use of social media by non-profit organizations in their advocacy work. More recently, I have been interested in campaigns, particularly at the state and local level. This work has particularly focused on what makes state politics more or less competitive.
PUBLICATIONS
Money Can't Buy Me Love: Self‐Financing in Oklahoma State Legislative Races. (2026). Social Science Quarterly, 107(3), e70168.
Little research has focused on the role that self-financing plays in state legislative races. Such races are an essential area of study as these races are often the starting ground for many eventual federal and gubernatorial candidates. These races are often run by less experienced candidates and often cost less. How does self-financing affect candidate performance in these races? These results raise interesting implications for how well studies of candidate self-financing using statewide and federal races may speak to state legislative races.
The Social Network?: Nonprofit Constituent Engagement Through Social Media. (2018). Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 30(3), 294-316.
Social media have become an important part of public relations for nonprofit organizations. Social media have the potential to engage stakeholders and constituents of nonprofit organizations. However, little scholarly attention has been focused on how users react to social media posts by nonprofit organizations. To enhance understanding of how organizational social media activity affects users’ engagement, this study examines Facebook and Twitter utilization and user response of nonprofit advocacy groups. The analysis reveals that users respond differently to stimuli across platforms.
Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System. (2015), Review of Policy Research, 32: 538–555. (with Simon Rosenthal, C., Rosenthal, J. A., and Moore, J. D.).
This analysis explores the role of city-level and state-level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate-related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom-up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self-interest in an increasingly global economy.
The Decline of Competitive State Primaries
Using historic data from all 50 states, this paper examines both whether state legislative races have become less competitive over time an considers structural explanations as to why. Among the key factors considers is the type of primary used.
IN PROGRESS
