Research Projects.
(Please download the reprinted articles for personal use only.)
1. Environmental Justice. I am starting a new project evaluating claims of race- and class-based disparities in state enforcement of federal environmental laws. This project is supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation and the University of Missouri.
Environmental Justice in Government Performance: Testing for Inequities in Environmental Enforcement, Working Paper.
2. Environmental Regulation. Much of my research focuses on state environmental regulation. In particular, I am interested in how economic development pressures affect state regulatory decision-making. These papers examine these topics from a variety of perspectives.
Regulatory Competition and Environmental Enforcement: Is There a Race to the Bottom? American Journal of Political Science 54(1): 853-72.
Regulator Attitudes and the Environmental Race to the Bottom Argument, Forthcoming in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.
Regulatory Enforcement in Border Counties: Do States Free Ride? (with Neal Woods), Working Paper.
Representative Bureaucracy: Attitudinal Congruence and Agency Expertise, Working Paper.
Assessing State Susceptibility to Environmental Regulatory Competition, Working Paper.
3. Local wetlands regulation. I recently completed a project with Steve Meyer on local wetlands protection in Massachusetts. In this project, we were interested in evaluating the conditions which lead communities to adopt more stringent wetlands protection standards than required by the state, and whether these additional regulations result in improved environmental outcomes.
Adopting Local Environmental Institutions: Environmental Need and Economic Constraints (with Stephen Meyer), 2007, Political Research Quarterly 60(1): 3-16.
Local Institutions and Environmental Outcomes: Evidence from Wetlands Protection in Massachusetts (with Stephen Meyer), Policy Studies Journal 35(3): 481-502.
4. Voting behavior. In addition to my research on environmental politics and policy, I also have general research interests in American politics. In this paper, Steve Ansolabere and I consider the degree to which voter registration requirements reduces voter turnout, exploiting natural experiements in New York and Ohio.
The Introduction of Voter Registration and its Effect on Turnout (with Stephen Ansolabehere), 2006, Political Analysis 14(1): 83-100.