Research
Research
Public Libraries: Negotiating Efficacy in an Era of Increased Contestation
Public libraries are one of the closest government institutions to the communities they serve, providing a range of civic and public goods to community members. However, over the past decade, community members and politicians have increasingly politicized public libraries and contested their community roles, particularly as it pertains to book bans, funding, and self-governance. While this type of political contestation is not unique, public libraries as a venue of politicization have been underrepresented within political science literature in comparison to other local government institutions. Specifically, how do public libraries operate within the constraints of their institutional capacities, both in times of normalcy and times of crisis? How does political contestation in public libraries look today? Who is most likely to support increased restrictions on public library operations? How do community members and local governments navigate the nuances of such restrictions? Answering these questions can shed light on how public libraries, and local democratic institutions more broadly, can continue to defend their democratic roles within the communities they serve. This dissertation employs a multi-method approach, including media analysis, survey analysis, and statistical analysis to answer these questions. The results of this analysis demonstrate that public libraries exert flexibility in their resource provision during times of crisis and that these efforts help to define democratic citizenship at the local level. Moreover, community members and local politicians are increasingly engaging in the politicization of public libraries, which in turn places public libraries and their advocates in positions where they have to redefine and defend the institutional value of public libraries. The findings presented in this dissertation situate public libraries in an era where democratic institutions in general are increasingly contested, and provide practical insights for policymakers and community members alike to navigate this politicization as public libraries continue to redefine and defend their institutional value. As democratic institutions continue to be contested, it is essential to continue researching how such institutions negotiate their efficacy, representation, and value.
Grads Teach Grads: Student-Led Workshops to Complement Department Graduate Methods Offerings. In First View at Journal of Political Science Education. With Alisson Rowland, Ryan Mundy, and Elane Westfaul.
Political science PhD programs vary in the structure and content of their teaching and research methods curricula. As a result, graduate students may find themselves taking methods training less directly aligned with their research or seeking out supplementary pedagogical training on their own. In this article, we suggest one possible approach for departments to enhance training opportunities for their students: graduate student-led methods workshops. In these workshops, advanced graduate students develop and present a workshop on a research or teaching method they are familiar with and regularly use. This article presents a case study of a workshop series at a political science PhD program at an R1 university and provides a practical analysis of the strengths and limitations of such a workshop program.
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. 2024. 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.
The Politics of Progressive Church Plants. In progress.
Progressive church plants—Protestant congregations founded within the past ten to fifteen years oriented around socially progressive theology—have begun to emerge across the United States. Many were established alongside the rise of Protestant deconstruction and the growth of the “exvangelical” movement. These churches often diverge from mainstream 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. Many of these organizations also provide their local communities with goods or services often overlooked by formal institutions. This exploratory paper uses interviews with founders and pastors of progressive church plants to analyze the roles progressive church plants play in their communities within their capacities as informal political institutions.
Book Bans: Supporters and Impacts on Governance, Coalitions, and Citizenship. In progress.
Research on book bans has expanded in political science in recent years, particularly focusing on the rise of book bans. However, less is known about the types of community members that support book bans and how community members and local governments navigate the nuances of such policies. Through an analysis of the 2022 General Society Survery and a case of book ban policies being implemented in the Huntington Beach Public Library System, this paper presents insights on the characteristics of the community members who are most likely to support book bans, and how book ban policies can impact forms of governance, influence group power and coalition development, and challenge the definition of local-level citizenship. The findings presented in this paper inform how community members perceive the role of public libraries and how book ban policies influence civic life beyond the walls of public libraries.