Research
Research
Public Libraries: Negotiating Efficacy in an Era of Increased Contestation
My dissertation uses public libraries as a case study to examine how local institutions negotiate their value at a time when their existence is increasingly contested. While local institutions are understood as agents whose actions are constrained by their principals, other policy actors, and higher levels of government, my research demonstrates the ways in which local institutions actively challenge the constraints they face to achieve their policy goals. I specifically look at the factors that shape institutional response to crises, how contestation of local institutions has evolved over time, and discrepancies between how community members and these institutions perceive the role of local institutions.
In my dissertation, I use data from the Public Libraries Survey and the results of the 2022 midterm elections to show how institutional responses to crises are shaped by both internal staffing dynamics and the partisan composition of the surrounding community. I also use data from the U.S. Census Bureau and conduct a media analysis to develop distinct categories of contestation that help explain the motivations behind citizen challenges to local institutions today in comparison to historical patterns. Finally, I use data from the General Society Survey and the U.S. Census Bureau to demonstrate that meaningful social discrepancies exist between community and institutional understandings of local governance roles. My findings challenge and extend theories on institutional efficacy, civic engagement, and political polarization.
California Politics is Local: Voting Behavior and Special Districts. Routledge. 2025. With Brett L. Savage.
Local governments make up the most common form of government in the United States. They are responsible for a wide variety of public goods, services, and policies that affect their community members’ lives daily. This is especially true in California, which is home to 58 counties, 482 cities, 1,037 school districts, and nearly 2,000 independent special districts. However, many questions remain regarding California's local politics, especially when it comes to the principal-agent relationship between local representatives and community members.
In California Politics is Local, Brett L. Savage and Jacob Sutherland argue that California politics should be viewed through a local lens due to the unique nature of the principal-agent relationship present in local governments around the state. By leveraging a variety of recent case studies about the contestation of civil rights and public goods and utilizing several novel datasets, they present a comprehensive understanding of California's local politics as it stands in the 21st century. Specifically, they provide one of the first studies dedicated to examining the opinions and perceptions held by special district representatives about the nature of their roles as community representatives, and they expand upon theories of participation at the local level pertaining to issues and office salience for different demographic and political groups.
California Politics is Local brings a fresh perspective to urban affairs, political institutions, civic engagement, and public policy studies in the Golden State.
Categories of Political Contestation in Public Libraries. State and Local Government Review. 2025. 57(1).
Public libraries in the United States have historically been the sites of political contestation and controversy. This ranges from contestation surrounding library funding to the content of library collections. Recently, activism within and against public libraries has become more frequent. This begs the question: how does political contestation in public libraries look today? Using a media analysis of U.S. public library contestation and controversy from 2014–2023, this paper presents a framework to categorize library contestation. This framework situates public libraries within an ongoing context of efforts to polarize local political institutions.
Who Participates in Local Elections? Evidence From Current Population Survey. Journal of Management Policy and Practice. 2024. 25(1).
Local elections have had historically low participation rates in the United States. Knowing who participates in local elections is important because it will allow democracy scholars to understand better whose interests are being represented in local governing bodies and explain how and why local governing bodies make the decisions they do. I use binary logistic regression analysis on survey responses from the U.S. Census Bureau’s September 2021 Current Population Survey Volunteering and Civic Life Supplement to analyze self-reported participation regarding demographic characteristics and state-level election policies. This paper finds that age, gender, education, race, homeownership, and family income are all important predictors of participation in local elections. Likewise, this paper finds that all mail elections and Same Day Registration have strong, statistically significant effects on local-level voter turnout, voter ID laws have a counterintuitive effect, the length of early voting periods has a small but statistically significant effect, and Automatic Voter Registration and direct democracy processes have no statistically significant effects on participation in local elections.
Local Institutional Responses to Crises: A Case Study on Public Library Resource Provision during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In progress.
As local policy-making institutions, public library systems engage in various day-to-day operational policies to benefit their communities. While much is known about the average policies public library systems develop, scholarship has largely ignored the political and institutional factors that determine the policy responses public library systems use to respond to crises. As public libraries and other local institutions increasingly face political contestation, understanding how public libraries operate within their institutional capacities can inform what is at stake when they face political contestation. Using the 2022 Public Libraries Survey, this paper analyzes the institutional and political factors that determine public library systems’ policy responses in times of crisis, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. The findings presented in this paper provide an understanding of how public library systems operate within the constraints of their institutional capacities and, more broadly, a foundation to inform future studies on local institutions.
Progressive Church Plants as Informal Political Institutions. In progress.
Progressive church plants, Protestant congregations founded within the past ten years and oriented around socially progressive theology, have emerged with increasing frequency across the United States. Many were established in the wake of the sociopolitical upheavals of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidential election, and a broader trend of Protestant deconstruction. These churches often diverge from traditional forms of Christianity, acting as a bridge between progressive theology and the desire among congregants to engage political issues within the constraints of church-state separation. This project explores the roles of progressive church plants in their communities and argues that they function as informal political institutions.
Pursuing diversity in political science with intentionality. The Western, 13(1). April 2023. With Charles Anthony Smith.
The Corporate Response to Capitol Riot Reflects Growing Culture of Accountability. The Progressive Magazine. January 2021.
A bad op-ed is more than just a bad take. The Objective. January 2021.
Gen Z will redefine—for the better—what it means to be an American. The San Diego Union-Tribune. June 2020.