Nathan L
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at Columbia University
Expertise
Political Science; public policy; environmental policy
Bio
My main academic interest is in how the institutional architecture of the American government shapes and constrains the set of policies that policymakers view as legitimate. For instance, I'm interested in how federalism impacts how the Democratic and Republican parties operate, both externally in elections and internally in when party members are in government. That said, I would describe my interests, within American politics, to be fairly wide-ranging. Personally, I love to read novels and write poems. I'm also a big outdoors person. Other than that, I like to explore. I currently live in New York City, so there's always something interesting to do!Project ideas
Exploring Differences in State Legislative Capacity
Between the fifty states, there is considerable variation when it comes to legislative capacity. Texas and New Hampshire, for instance, only have their state legislatures meet every other year. Other states limit the number of days their legislators are allowed to work. These differences can impact the type and number of policy issues that each state addresses in any given year. For instance, in the year 2019, Arkansas passed over 40 rules related to child welfare, whereas Virginia only passed about 20, and other states passed only a handful. What, specifically, caused this to happen? One hypothesis could be that different states just had different needs when it came to child welfare policy in that year. Or, perhaps, states like Arkansas had more resources (proportionally) to devote to this policy area. To adjudicate between these and other hypotheses, for instance, I would encourage students to start with formal theory. You can build fairly straightforward mathematical models that isolate key aspects of the interactions amongst legislators, and between legislators and other members of state governments. Those models then generate predictions that we can test with different regressions.