I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brigham Young University.

I research how US governments represent their constituents. More specifically, I use quantitative methods to examine factors (like electoral institutions and partisanship) that potentially influence policy outcomes and politicians’ behavior and perceptions of their constituents. Though my work spans all levels of government, most of it involves municipal politics and politicians in the US. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.

I am also the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at BYU and a fellow with the Laboratories of Democracy, a non-profit research organization of political scientists that collaborates with local and state officials on field experimental research.

I am also the co-principal investigator of the 2012, 2014, and 2016 American Municipal Officials Surveys, which are large-N surveys of elected municipal officials from across the US.

I received my Ph.D. from Yale University. Prior to graduate school, I worked in state politics on education policy for 4 years and attended Brigham Young University as an undergraduate.