I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I study American Political Institutions. Recent research projects of mine have involved elections, congress, and computational political economy.
After completing my Ph.D. at Duke University in the summer of 2006 I moved with my wife to Milwaukee's East Side. We like the beer here. We like the baseball in Boston.
Baseball, Politics, Music, Food. In no particular order.
My research and my life run on Mac OS X.
Lately, I have been thinking about complexity in politics, as approached by the adaptive parties model. Currently, I am investigating the empirical implications of the model for congressional elections. Some of this work is with Michael Ensley and Scott de Marchi.
With Michael Munger and Jennifer Merolla I have been studying the Electoral College and the way campaign strategies in presidential elections might resemble a Colonel Blotto game.
I have been working with John Aldrich and David Rohde on their ongoing study of Congress and conditional party government. We have written several papers on measuring and modeling CPG. More recently, we have examined the electoral connection between partisan strength in Congress and congressional districts. Scott de Marchi, Mike Brady, Ian MacDonald and Brendan Nyhan are also working on this project.
In the Summer of 2007, with the help of a Dirksen Congressional Center Research Award, Brendan Nyhan and I began studying social networks and party leaders in Congress.
You may enjoy some pictures I took at the 2008 Iowa Caucus.