Marijuana/Drug Politics

• The Marijuana Movement, Coalitions, and Influence over Marijuana Discourse [ Working Paper ]
  I demonstrate how changes in the way the marijuana movement and civil rights organizations talked about marijuana set off changes in popular discourse about marijuana.

• Politics and Discursive Change [ Published | PDF ]
  I show that marijuana politics (e.g. legalization, medicalization) and structural conditions (e.g. crime) created opportunities for (and influenced changes in) marijuana discourse across the U.S.

• The Diffusion of Legalization [ Published | PDF ]
  I show that places with strong direct democratic infrastructures had more quickly adopted marjiuana legalization in the United States.

• Structural Determinants of Support for Legalization [ Under Review ]
  I demonstrate how segregation across U.S. communities contributes to support for marijuana legalization.

• Discourse and State Cannabis Legislation [ Published | PDF ]
  I explore framing/language variation in state-level cannabis legislation.

Methodology

• Robustness Assessment for QCA [ R&R | R package ]
  My colleague Ben Gibson and I developed a method to improve the robustness of results from Qualitiative Comparative Analysis.

• Operationalizing Political Outcomes [ Under Review ]
  I develop new measures for measuring policy change and predictors of state-level predictors of policy change.

• Supervised Learning and Organizational Classification in the Dynamics of Collective Action [ In Progress ]
  Despite poor coding/classification of organizations, data from the Dynamics of Collective Action (DOCA) have been widely used. Using natural language processing techniques, I provide a cleaned DOCA data set, and demonstrate the drastically distinct results the two data sets produce.

Social Movements

• Barriers to Participation [ Under Review ]
  Using a sample of college students, we demonstrate that beyond biographic factors, negative perceptions of protest and protestors inhibit participation in campus protest.

• "Good" News Coverage of the Civil Rights Movement [ Published | PDF ]
  My coauthors and I find that CRM organizations were able to attract more substantive coverage (coverage that adequately reflects the goals and views of the organizations) when they were moderate, if they were non-moderate but employed multiple types of action, or if they were not under investigation.

• Substantive Coverage of Social Movements [ Published | PDF ]
  My coauthors and I review and suggest directions in research on the ways in which social movement organizations get covered substantively.

• Tea Party Movement Emergence [ Published | PDF ]
  My coauthors and I explore how the distribution of the highly educated across local contexts influenced the emergence of the Tea Party.

Policing, Drugs, Race, and Injustice

• Policing and Crime around Marijuana Dispensaries [ Under Review ]
  My colleague Joshua Chanin and I demonstrate policing tends to concentrate around dispensaries, but this policing doesn't have a deterrent effect on crime.

Policy and Political Change

• The Consequences of the Pandemic on Black Political Action [ In Progress ]
  Christopher Parker and I are collaborating to investigate the impacts of pandemic-related anxiety on the depression of political behavior by people of color.

• Racial Minority Interest Group Lobbying in California [ In Progress ]
  My colleague Nhat-Dang Do and I demonstrate that RMIGs influence policy change when building (and collaborating with) coalitions that cut across racial-ethnic organizations.

• Politician Decision-Making [ Published | PDF ]
  I demonstrate that incumbent politicians' voting patterns are influenced by recently elected movement-endorsed representatives, changing the overall structure of Congress. Politicians do pander to movements.

• Electoral Counter-Mobilization [ Published | PDF ]
  I demonstrate that while organizations tend to help movement-aligned causes, movement activity (in the form of rallies or protests) tend to yield negative consequences (electoral countermobilization).