Research Interests
I am a political behavioralist. (What is political behavior?) My research interests are:
- Empirical investigation of deliberative democracy
- Behavior of active-duty military members and veterans on both sides of the ballot box: as candidates and veterans
Here is more detail on each:
Empirical investigation of deliberative democracy:
Proponents of deliberation make a number of intriguing claims about deliberation’s potential to renew democracy through acts of self-government by ordinary people. The theoretical literature on deliberation is rich, and case studies and a few experiments seem to show deliberation can increase knowledge and change opinions in desirable ways. But deliberative designs and results have been subjected to little empirical investigation. I am currently looking at the role of the small-group moderator called for in several popular deliberation designs. My question is this: Do ordinary people deliberating in small groups need a moderator to ensure a full, fair and satisfying discussion of the issue at hand, or can they accomplish this on their own? The answer has important implications for our understanding of citizens’ capacity for self-government and the ability of convening groups to unduly influence — or not — deliberative outcomes. It also has practical value. Given the fantastically high cost of conducting a deliberation, it would be useful to know whether the expense of recruiting, training and compensating moderators could be eliminated.
Voting behavior of military members and veterans:
There are ample theoretical and “conventional wisdom”-based reasons to think members of the military and its veterans might behave differently from the general public in politics. Their votes are clearly important to the political parties, who battled over whether to count the military’s overseas absentee ballots in the presidential election of 2000. Yet, in general, analysis of military political behavior essentially stopped following some scattered post-Vietnam studies. History shows the servicepeople who fight in wars have long-lasting effects on politics: see the candidacies of past military heroes and the contemporary candidacies of veterans like John McCain and John Kerry for example. With the United States in the midst of its second war in the Mideast, it is essential to discover how military members will influence electoral outcomes in the short and long term. My current research looks at how presidential candidates use their military backgrounds to win votes among the public at large, asking this question: Does having higher veteran prestige than his opponent help the candidate win?
A political behavioralist is a political scientist who studies political behavior. So what’s that? One good definition comes from the description of the journal Political Behavior on JSTOR:
Political Behavior incorporates economic approaches to understanding political behavior (preference structuring, bargaining), psychological approaches (attitude formation and change, motivations, perceptions), and sociological approaches (roles, group, class), as well as those more explicitly political in orientation. Articles focus on the political behavior (conventional or unconventional) of the individual person or small group, or of large organizations that participate in the political process, such as parties, interest groups, political action committees, governmental agencies, and mass media.
In political science, studying political behavior does not have the same negative connotation B.F. Skinner-style behaviorism does in psychology.