Research and Projects

All of my research seeks to understand the determinants of policy in areas important to the public, including regulatory, fiscal, social welfare, and climate change policy. I have three main lines of research: political centrism, the politics of carbon pricing, and the political economy of taxation.

My dissertation focuses on the uses of political centrism as it appears in the mainstream media and social science, and as it is advocated for by self-identified “centrists.” My work demonstrates how “centrism” holds a variety of meanings, how its use often implies multiple meanings simultaneously, and how this ambiguity often has the effect of presenting the positions preferred by the wealthy and by corporate interests – such as lower taxes, lower social spending, weaker regulations – as common sense, neutral, popular, or representative of an expert consensus. Centrism is a pleasant-sounding term associated with compromise, democracy, and sound, unbiased policy decisions, but in practice it remains so ambiguous that it can be applied to just about any policy position.

My second line of research focuses on the political, historical, institutional, and interest group factors in carbon tax adoptions, both in Washington state and the OECD. I find that political and fiscal institutions shape the likelihood that carbon taxes are pursued and adopted in both cases. Importantly, I find it that the polities with administrative capacity for, and institutionalization of, indirect taxes (sales, VAT, excise) are those most likely to be early adopters of carbon taxes and the most likely to adopt them with a higher price on carbon. My third line of research focuses on the political, economic, and social determinants of fiscal systems. Along with Dr. Edgar Kiser I have written about the political economy of tax systems, the connection between economic growth and the size of the state, and the relationship between taxation and good governance. We currently have several other projects related to tax administration, tax revenues, corruption, and state legitimacy in Southern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Japan. I have collaborated with scholars outside of my discipline, including those in political science, public health, and social work, and hope I can continue to work similarly both within and outside of my discipline in the future.

I am a multi-method social science researcher. I have experience with linear, multilevel, random effects, and fixed effects regression modeling. I have also conducted case-based studies, historical analysis, ethnographic interviews, content analysis (of newspaper articles), and text analysis (including semantic analysis and other natural language processing methods). I am very experienced with the R statistical software, and am comfortable with data management, linking data sets, cleaning data, visualizing data (ggplot2), and creating documents and webpages with RMarkdown. I’m experienced with Census data, social surveys such as the General Social Survey and the World Values Survey, political surveys such as the American National Election Study and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and comparative political data sets such as the Quality of Government Dataset and the Comparative Welfare States Dataset. I have also used Stata, SPSS, and SQL for various projects and teaching purposes. While at the University of Washington I have taken advantage of the large menu of courses offered by the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, taking courses in linear regression, panel data, maximum likelihood, data visualization, Bayesian statistics, and a course on the statistics of surveys and voting behavior. In addition, I currently work as a consultant in the UW Center for Social Science Computation and Research, and as a virtual mentor helping a group of public health scholars in Sub-Saharan Africa learn R.