My research agenda contributes to several substantive areas of political institutions and American politics, united by a common theme of how policy conflict interacts with institutional features and methodologically by the use of formal theory to model the choices of political actors.

In Textual Ambiguity in the Legislative Process, I model the intra-legislature collective action problem presented by ambiguity, that is, a single statement conveying multiple meanings, in written law. Legislators (and their staffers) are cognitively bounded by search costs entailed in discovering meaningful ambiguities in bills and other legislative instruments. Given the natural propensity of human language to contain ambiguity, this would be enough to preserve some ambiguities in law, even under a unitary lawmaker. However, the multi-member legislative setting exacerbates this problem in two ways. First, legislators may have incentives to shirk in their own search in hopes that others will exert effort instead. Second, legislators may have incompatible expectations on how ambiguity will eventually be resolved. Therefore, ambiguity presents a distinct problem in collective action settings, and ambiguity in law need not be a rational act of delegation as proposed by prior theories and may instead respond to purely legislative conditions.

Similarly, my papers with John Weymark and Alan Wiseman, Partisan Strength and Legislative Bargaining (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2019) and Legislative Bargaining and Partisan Delegation (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2020), confront an aspect of legislative partisanship overlooked by prior treatments: other-regarding preferences. Previous literature has emphasized ideological alignment (and to a lesser extent, shared regional interests) as an underpinning of party power (and distributive outcomes respectively). However, positive spillovers between copartisans, more broadly conceived, can also affect the likely winning coalitions in distributive politics, an area thought to be less affected by partisanship, and materially enrich those copartisans in absolute terms. Such spillovers further have a role in determining when legislative party members are amenable to delegating agenda power to a party leader.

My paper on the development of state capacity in democracies, Policy Conflict and the Distribution of Government Capacity, seeks to unify two literatures to re-contextualize debates on centralization and decentralization. Conventional wisdom and historical pattern seem to identify the absolute level and the degree of centralization of state capacity as correlates, if not necessarily complements. On the other hand, theories of fiscal federalism and empirical studies on ethnic fractionalization argue that population heterogeneity leads to conflict over policy, which reduces support for the state and provision of public goods. Do states need to be centralized (and thus often heterogeneous) to be strong, or do they instead need to be homogeneous (and thus often decentralized)? The answer may be both and neither: Heterogeneity can constrain capacity development at both the local and national level. When local and national government capacity serve as complements, cooperative federalism becomes sustainable, and the efficacy of government depends on the degree of policy conflict both locally and nationally. This project also generalizes existing models of policy conflict, introduces a novel welfare result regarding heterogeneity of policy preferences, and relates substantive (i.e., policy-constraining) constitutional rules to capacity development. I have also examined the role of constitutional constraints on state policymaking procedures and substantive policy in the context of competitive federalism in a chapter in a collected volume, State Leviathan and Tax Competition under a Federal Constitution.