Natália S. Bueno is an assistant professor at Emory University. She studies comparative politics. Her research concerns comparative public policy, political economy of development, and elections, with a regional concentration in Latin America. She is working on a book on nonstate welfare provision. Her research has been published at the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, World Politics, among other outlets.
Justin de Benedictus-Kessner is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a political scientist who teaches and does research in American politics, with a focus on political behavior, public policy, local politics, elections, and experimental and quantitative methodology.
His current research focuses on three areas: how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates their interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed. To address questions in these areas, he gathers original data from local politics. Methodologically, his work blends several approaches. His evidence comes from original large-scale elections and communications data, surveys, and administrative data gathered through partnerships with governments and service providers, and he uses rigorous causal research designs to test his theories. The findings from his research overall indicate that psychological biases, election timing, and political communication can all frustrate voters’ ability to evaluate government and to hold politicians accountable. Individuals’ policy opinions may also be subject to influence from sources such as the media, suggesting further barriers to democratic representation. Despite these hurdles, voters’ interests can translate into different policies via partisan representation, even in low-information local elections.
His current research focuses on three areas: how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates their interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed. To address questions in these areas, he gathers original data from local politics. Methodologically, his work blends several approaches. His evidence comes from original large-scale elections and communications data, surveys, and administrative data gathered through partnerships with governments and service providers, and he uses rigorous causal research designs to test his theories. The findings from his research overall indicate that psychological biases, election timing, and political communication can all frustrate voters’ ability to evaluate government and to hold politicians accountable. Individuals’ policy opinions may also be subject to influence from sources such as the media, suggesting further barriers to democratic representation. Despite these hurdles, voters’ interests can translate into different policies via partisan representation, even in low-information local elections.
Katherine Levine Einstein is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University. She joined the department in 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests broadly include urban politics and policy, racial and ethnic politics, and American public policy. She currently serves as Assistant Director of Policy at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. She is a member of the editorial board of the Urban Affairs Review, and a faculty affiliate of Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, Hariri Institute for Computing and Computation Science & Engineering, and Department of African American Studies.
Her first book, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in Democratic Politics (with Jennifer Hochschild, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), explores the harmful effects of misinformation on democratic politics. Her second book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (with David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, Cambridge University Press, 2019), investigates how political inequality shapes housing policy. She is currently co-principal investigator of the Menino Survey of Mayors, a multi-year survey of U.S. mayors exploring a wide spectrum of political and policy issues.
Her first book, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in Democratic Politics (with Jennifer Hochschild, University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), explores the harmful effects of misinformation on democratic politics. Her second book, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (with David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, Cambridge University Press, 2019), investigates how political inequality shapes housing policy. She is currently co-principal investigator of the Menino Survey of Mayors, a multi-year survey of U.S. mayors exploring a wide spectrum of political and policy issues.
Michael Hankinson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the George Washington University. He studies American politics, with a focus on political behavior, public policy, local politics, and inequality. Specifically, he uses original data to show that collective outcomes in housing, health policy, and voting behavior are all shaped by the spatial scale of institutions. Methodologically, he leverages geocodable observational data as well as original survey and experimental approaches. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and Social Forces. He received his Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University and my B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Thought & Practice from the University of Virginia.
Tanu Kumar is a postdoctoral fellow at William & Mary's Global Research Institute.. Starting in July 2022, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Division of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Tanu studies policies to manage rapid urban growth, mainly in India. Her current book project (short title: Housing as welfare) is part of a larger research agenda that aims to highlight the role of subsidized homeownership in social mobility in low- and middle-income countries. Tanu also studies policies surrounding water and digital technologies to improve service delivery.
William Marble is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He earned his PhD in the Political Science Department at Stanford University in 2021. His work investigates the ways that economic and social context influence political attitudes, campaigns, and behavior. Using administrative data, surveys, and social media data – along with modern causal inference methods and rigorous descriptive methods – he generates new insights about the forces that shape modern politics and explores the interplay between nationalization of politics and regional divergence of economic opportunity. He is refining a structural approach to the issue substance of politics that combines new advances in measuring candidates’ issue-specific ideal points with survey and electoral data to enable a fine-grained accounting of evolution of the nature of political competition from 1980 to the present.
Alexander Sahn is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He earned his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2020. His research seeks to understand and reduce racial inequalities in American political economy. His book project shows how the interaction of individual attitudes and institutions in local governments in the US lead to land use policies responsible for the housing affordability crisis. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, and Political Analysis.
Jessica Trounstine is the UC Merced Foundation Board of Trustees Presidential Chair, and studies American politics with a focus on sub-national politics, primarily concentrating on large cities. Her work studies the process and quality of representation. She is particularly interested in how political institutions enhance or limit the ability of residents to achieve responsive government. Trounstine takes a mixed method approach to her scholarship including using historical analysis, qualitative data and quantitative methods. She has served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice, city governments, and various community organizations; and serves on numerous editorial and foundation boards.