Research

We propose Sci2Pol-Bench and Sci2Pol-Corpus, the first benchmark and training dataset for evaluating and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on policy brief generation from a scientific paper. We build Sci2Pol-Bench on a five-stage taxonomy to mirror the human writing process: (i) Autocompletion, (ii) Understanding, (iii) Summarization, (iv) Generation, and (v) Verification. It features 18 tasks in multiple-choice and open-ended formats. Specifically, for the Generation stage, we show that BERTScore and ROUGE scores fail to capture the quality of brief writing, and introduce a new LLM-based evaluation metric aligned with expert judgement. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 13 leading open-source and commercial LLMs to uncover key limitations. To improve LLM performance on brief writing, we curate the Sci2Pol-Corpus for fine-tuning. We start by linking each cited scientific paper to its corresponding policy document, drawn from 5.6 million policy records. This produces 140,000 candidate pairs. We then employ an LLM-as-a-judge to filter high-quality examples, followed by in-context polishing using three expert-written samples as references. This process yields a final set of 639 new pairs. Finally, we fine-tune three models on Sci2Pol-Corpus: LLaMA-3.1-8B, Gemma-12B, and Gemma-27B. Fine-tuning leads to consistent performance improvements across Sci2Pol-Bench. Notably, after fine-tuning, Gemma-27B surpasses the much larger GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 (671B). These demonstrate the effectiveness of our corpus in bridging the gap between science and policy.

Lawmakers vary considerably in how effectively they advance their priorities through Congress. However, the actual proposal-writing strategies undergirding these differences have remained largely unexplored, due to measurement and methodological difficulties. These obstacles have included prohibitively small sample sizes, costly data requirements, and strong theoretical assumptions. In this paper, we address these obstacles and analyze the proposal strategies of effective lawmakers directly, using original measures of the spatial locations of congressional bill proposals and associated status quos generated by jointly scaling cosponsorship, roll-call, and interest group position-taking data for 1,007 bills from the 110th through 114th Congresses. Because interest groups take positions on bills before they receive votes, our measures cover many bills that die in committee, permitting comparisons between successful and unsuccessful bills. We demonstrate that legislative advancement favors moderate proposals over partisan ones, and that effective lawmakers are those who make proposals closer to the median even at the expense of their preferred policy.

This article investigates whether campaign contributions and lobbying are complementary, substitutive, or distinct forms of organizational political engagement. Our study reveals minimal overlap between organizations that engage in lobbying and those that make campaign contributions despite the perception that these activities are interchangeable forms of "money in politics." Using comprehensive contribution and lobbying report data from 1998 to 2018, we find that most politically active organizations focus exclusively on either lobbying or making campaign contributions. Only a small percentage of organizations engage in both activities. This finding challenges the assumption that these forms of political activity are inherently linked. The majority of organizations engaged in political activity do so exclusively through lobbying. However, the top lobbying groups spend the most money and almost always have affiliated political action committees (PACs). Most lobbying money is spent by a small number of big spenders—organizations that also have affiliated PACs. Organizations that both lobby and make campaign contributions tend to be well resourced and rare.

We examine the strategic use of contract and in‐house lobbyists by interest groups in response to shifting policy agendas. The role that lobbyists play in the policy process changes based on the policy agenda. Most of the time, subsystems manage small changes to public policy, rewarding actors with long‐term relationships. Organizations with a deep interest in the issue area maintain permanent lobbying presences, earning some degree of privilege over policymaking. However, when the broader macropolitical agenda lurches toward the issue, new participants become involved. New participants often lack the lobbying expertise of the in‐house lobbyists of established actors. Contract lobbyists play a critical role in providing spare capacity on‐demand, allowing participants not normally involved in subsystems to lobby. They also allow the best‐resourced actors, who may employ a long‐term lobbying presence, to further expand it when necessary. We test this theory using a new dataset of the lobbying content of 1,370,396 bill mentions in U.S. lobbying disclosure reports by 11,842 organizations from 2006 to 2016. We compare their policy agenda to that of the U.S. Congress. We find strong evidence that organizations hire contract lobbyists to respond to brief moments of agenda setting while permanent in‐house lobbyists have a more stable agenda.

This article examines the policy topics and theoretical debates found in Policy Studies Journal (PSJ) articles over the last three decades. PSJ is the premier journal for scholars studying policy processes, seeking to create generalizable theories across the spectrum of specific policy areas. To examine trends in PSJ over time, we collected 1314 abstracts from PSJ articles. We identified abstracts that mention major theories of the policy process and stages of the policy cycle. Next, we measured their policy content using the Comparative Agendas Project codebook, as well as their citations in academic journals and policy documents. We then explore these data, finding that changes in the content of PSJ articles over time correspond with other trends in the policy process field and PSJ's increased impact factor.

Campaign donors and corporate interests have greater access to Congress, and the legislative agenda and policy outcomes reflect their preferences. How this privileged access converts into influence remains unclear because petitioner-legislator interactions are unobserved. In this article, we report the results of an original survey experiment of 436 congressional staffers. The vignette manipulates a petitioner's identity, the substance of the request, and the supporting evidence being offered. We test how likely staff are to take a meeting, to use the information being offered, and to recommend taking a position consistent with the request, as well as whether they perceive the request to be congruent with constituent preferences. Donors and lobbyists are no more likely to be granted access than constituents, but staffers are more likely to use information and to make legislative action recommendations when the information source is an ideologically aligned think tank. Subgroup analysis suggests these effects are particularly strong among ideological extremists and strong partisans. And, information offered by aligned think tanks are thought to be representative of constituent opinion. Our results reveal the partisan and ideological predispositions that motivate legislative action that is more costly than merely granting access.

Like all modern innovations in political science, the Junior Americanist Workshop Series (JAWS) originated from a Twitter thread. When one of our cadre mused about whether zero-cost virtual seminars could fill the void left by the many in-person conferences and workshops canceled or converted to costly remote formats due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we came together to answer the call. The founding vision of JAWS was to provide cost-free opportunities for early-career American politics scholars to present their research and receive feedback from leading scholars in their field. JAWS has evolved and currently provides free networking and professional-development opportunities, which many scholars had lost access to during the pandemic when conferences were curtailed and university buildings were closed. This article discusses how we developed JAWS, the challenges that we faced, and how we envision the workshop continuing as a complement to traditional in-person conferences in the post-pandemic world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a system-wide economic downturn disrupting virtually every conceivable economic interest. Which interests do legislators publicly champion during such crises? Here, we examine mentions of particular industries across thousands of press releases issued by members of Congress during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (January to June 2020). We show that members consistently emphasized interests significant to their constituency and party network, but less so their direct campaign contributors or ideological allies. This suggests that members believe that they must be seen as good district representatives and party stewards even when national crises could justifiably induce them to favor any number of interests.

Think tanks have become central players in the political and policy ecosystem of the United States, yet the communication and coordination strategies and connections between them remain relatively unexamined. This paper begins to remedy that by using IRS 990 data to construct and analyze the largest board interlock network among policy planning organizations to date. An analysis of 277 policy research organizations located in Washington D.C. reveals high levels of resource seeking, issue-area coordination and weak evidence of ideological coordination among these substantively important organizations in American politics.

Attribution of cyberattacks has strategic and technical components. We provide a formal model that incorporates both elements and shows the conditions under which it is rational to tolerate an attack and when it is better to assign blame publicly. The model applies to a wide range of conflicts and provides guidance to policymakers about which parameters must be estimated to make a sound decision about attribution and blame. It also draws some surprising conclusions about the risks of asymmetric technical attribution capabilities.