Sci2Pol: Evaluating and Fine-tuning LLMs on Scientific-to-Policy Brief Generation
Proceedings of ICLR, 2026
Research
Publications
Refereed Articles
Partisan disparities in the funding of science in the United States
Science 389(6766): 1195–1200, 2025
Covered in Time, The Atlantic, The Economist, Northwestern Now, Kellogg Insight
Partisan disparities in the use of science in policy
Science 388(6745): 362–367, 2025
Covered in Nature (×2), Kellogg Insight, Splinter News, The Daily Northwestern, IFLScience
Pivots or Partisans? Proposal-Making Strategy and Status Quo Selection in Congress
Quarterly Journal of Political Science 20(2): 139–181, 2025
PS: Political Science & Politics, 1–9, 2025
The people think what I think: False consensus and unelected elite misperception of public opinion
American Journal of Political Science, 2024
Covered in Psychology Today, Slow Boring, the Financial Times
Lobbying responsiveness to congressional policy agendas
Policy Studies Journal 52(1): 11–29, 2024
The dynamics of issue attention in policy process scholarship
Policy Studies Journal 52(3): 481–492, 2024
Political Research Quarterly 76(1): 348–364, 2023
The Junior Americanist Workshop Series
PS: Political Science & Politics 55(3): 552–553, 2022
Partisan competition and the decline in legislative capacity among congressional offices
Legislative Studies Quarterly 46(3): 745–789, 2021
🏆 Best Publication on Effective Lawmaking 2022 · Top Cited Article 2020–2022 (Wiley)
Pandemic Pluralism: Legislator Championing of Organized Interests in Response to COVID-19
Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy 2(1): 23–41, 2021
Resources and agendas: Combining Walker's insights with new data sources to chart a path ahead
Interest Groups & Advocacy 10(1): 85–90, 2021
Polarized pluralism: Organizational preferences and biases in the American pressure system
American Political Science Review 114(4): 1117–1137, 2020
🏆 2019 Best Paper Award, APSA Political Organizations & Parties
Interest Groups & Advocacy 9(3): 342–360, 2020
Coalitions and coordination in Washington think tanks
Applied Network Science 5(1): 1–17, 2020
The partisan ties of lobbying firms
Research & Politics 6(3), 2019
🏆 2017 Best Paper Award, APSA Political Organizations & Parties · HM 2018, ECPR Interest Groups
Strategic aspects of cyberattack, attribution, and blame
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(11): 2825–2830, 2017
Book Chapters
The Congressional Capacity Survey: Who Staff Are, How They Got There, What They Do, and Where They Go
In Congress Overwhelmed, University of Chicago Press, 2020
Descriptive Network Analysis: Interest Group Lobbying Dynamics Around Immigration
In Analytics, Policy, and Governance, Yale University Press, 2017
Procurement Disclosure in the Slovak Republic
In Civic Media Project, MIT Press, 2015
Book Project
Taking Sides: Party Competition, Interest Group Strategy, and the Polarization of American Pluralism
Book manuscript in preparation · Download proposal ↗
About the book
While most interest groups in the United States still describe themselves as non-partisan, they have, in practice, aligned themselves with one of the two major political parties. Taking Sides documents a 50-year growth in interest group partisanship, examines why and when groups have grown more partisan, and explores the consequences for American government and democracy.
Leveraging a massive new dataset of over 200,000 interest group positions on congressional legislation from 1973 to 2021, along with innovative preference scaling and text analysis, the book offers the first examination of how modern party competition influences interest group strategy and lobbying success. We argue that party competition — rooted in the rise of insecure majorities and solidified during the Gingrich Revolution — has ensnared many organized interests into a feedback loop in which partisanship gets groups' priorities onto the legislative agenda, but only when the group contributes to their party's political brand. The result is a new democratic challenge: once drawn into partisan coalitions, interest groups no longer operate as independent advocates for their members' priorities, but become extensions of party networks — eroding the fluid, cross-cutting coalitions that pluralist theories of democracy assume.
Reports
New America, 2023
Congressional Brain Drain: Legislative Capacity in the 21st Century
New America, 2020
Cited in Final Report of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Referenced in letters from House Leadership urging staff pay increases; 21% MRA increase signed into law in 2022.
Working Papers
Bipartisan-cited Science
Under revision at PNAS
Political Elites' Partisan Beliefs About Climate Change
R&R at Environmental Research Communications
Mapping Policy Opportunities in Science
Privately-Funded Think Tanks and Bias in the U.S. Policy Advisory System
Partisan Disparities in the Production of Science
Science and Polarization of Public Policymaking: Analysis of U.S. Think Tanks' Policy Documents
Biasing Their Bosses: Staff Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and the Distortion of Information in Congress
Congressional Staffer Policy Portfolios
Elite Ideology, Partisanship & Information: Two experiments on political elites
Gaining Access Without Buying It: Campaign Contributions, Allies, and Lobbying on Capitol Hill
Using Model Legislation to Estimate Ideology Scores for State Legislators
Policy Impact and Scientific Tradeoffs of Service on Federal Advisory Committees
The Policy Agenda of Social Scientific Research