Research

Current Research

Environmental Policy Project

My environmental policy research explores the relationship between environmental policy and democracy in the United States. I work in the traditions of public policy, American political development, and political theory. In my historical approach to environmental policy, I examine the interplay between ideational and institutional development, that is, how the ways we think about the environment and the policies, laws, and institutions we build to govern the environment shape one another through time. In my theoretical work, I bridge normative and empirical accounts of environment politics to develop positive models of environmental governance. Taken as a whole, my research shed lights on twentieth century environmental political development and provides theoretically-grounded normative visions for environmental protection.

My dissertation explored the evolution of U.S. forest policy and the turn to collaborative environmental governance. Elements of this project were published in “Democracy, Legitimacy, and Scale: Examining Habermas’ Administrative Turn through the Case of U.S. Forest Policy” (Administrative Theory & Praxis, 2020) and “Toward a Resilient Localism” (Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience, 2020). My current research examines U.S. environmental political development more broadly from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. My book project and working papers explore the construction of “green state”—the federal architecture of environmental governance—and the role of partisan actors and ideologies in its development over time. This research has been published in “The Trump Administration and Environmental Policy: Reagan Redux?” (Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2018).

Monograph

Building and Contesting the Green State: Partisanship and Environmental Policy in the U.S.

In this monograph, I trace the development of the “green state” from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, highlighting the role of partisan ideology and party competition in shaping this development. My initial research shows that the institutional construction of the green state occurred through the consolidation of two developmental pathways—a natural resource policy regime that was institutionalized at the federal level at the turn of the twentieth century and a pollution control policy regime driven by public health concerns that began at the municipal level, expanded to state-level governance, and was federalized in the 1970s. This consolidation was both ideational and institutional and was driven by political entrepreneurs, primarily in the Democratic party, seeking to mobilize electoral constituencies and to merge multiple policy streams into a coherent political agenda. My archival research to date, supported by a John F. Kennedy Presidential Library fellowship, has focused on the midcentury period (1950-1970) and includes the records of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Kennedy Administration, and the papers of Stewart Udall (Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson). This research shows that political entrepreneurs in the Democratic party organization and in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations conceptualized “environmental protection” as a merging of concerns about pollution control and “conservation” (protective natural resource management). In the late 1950s, the Democratic National Committee, led by Paul Butler, highlighted the actions of the Eisenhower administration on natural resources issues in order to mobilize conservation voters and began to wed pollution control and natural resource protection. This is the first time that “environmental” issues were politicized, that is, framed as a partisan concern. From 1960-1968, Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under both Kennedy and Johnson, continued this effort to bring together conservation and pollution control and began building the executive branch architecture for federal environmental governance. These developments set the stage for the adoption of wide-ranging federal environmental statutes in the 1970s, which were pushed by Democratic and moderate Republican representatives. In providing a new narrative of environmental development, I show that the expansion of federal environmental policy in the 1960-1970s was the result of not only public pressure, but also the convictions and electoral strategies of elite political actors.

While the first half of the monograph will trace the evolution and politicization of incipient environmental issues, the second half will detail the turn against environmental protection by the Republican party. The broad strokes of this development have been covered well by Judith Layzer, James Turner, Christopher Klyza and David Sousa, and Alex Boynton. However, this scholarship focuses on the 1970s-2000s without situating the Republican party’s evolution on environment in a longer history. In “The Trump Administration and Environmental Policy: Reagan Redux?,” I periodized the Republican ideological shifts on environment through an analysis of party platforms. A working paper pulls this analysis back to the turn of the twentieth century. This research has already begun to shed light on the continuities and discontinuities of the Republican party’s environmental ideology over its long history. The monograph will fully tell the story of how the party went from champion of conservation in Theodore Roosevelt to the nadir of environmental protection in Trump.

Overall, I aim for this monograph to be a definitive history of environmental political development in the United States. Continued primary research will consist of archival research at presidential libraries and at other venues holding collected papers of key political actors, as well as analysis of archival resources available online, including the congressional record and historical newspaper coverage.

Working Papers

“The Parties’ Environment: Tracing the Evolution of Environmental Ideology in Republican and Democratic Party Platforms, 1856-2016” 

Abstract: Environmental issues rank high in partisan polarization. In order historically situate the partisan divide on environment, I examine the evolution of partisan environmental ideology through an analysis of party platforms from 1856 to 2016. I identified, coded, and analyzed the following variables in each platform: (1) the specific natural resource and environmental issues addressed; (2) how these resources and issues should be managed; (3) the role of natural resources and environment in national life; (4) the role of government in managing natural resources and environmental issues and the level at which this management should occur; (5) the policies advocated; and (6) the relationship of private enterprise to natural resource and environmental issues. Together these variables comprise a philosophy of natural resources and environmental governance, what I refer to as the party’s environmental ideology. I identify both continuities and key discursive shifts, which I use to periodize the parties’ environmental ideological evolution.

“Going Green in the Fifties: The Democratic Party and the Birth of Environmental Partisanship” 

Abstract: Analysis of congressional voting and presidential action shows the growth of partisan polarization on environmental issues in the late 1970s, culminating in the partisan gulf we see today. While scholars have offered accounts of the Republican anti-environmental shift, much less is known about the Democratic party’s association with environment as a policy issue. Drawing on the records of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), I illuminate the Democratic party’s strategic use of the issue of natural resources to mobilize voters and conservation groups in the period 1955-1960. Led by its Chairman, Paul Butler, the DNC developed an organizational focus on natural resources, generated programmatic materials on natural resources, and created and employed propaganda on natural resources intended to influence the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections. Organizationally, the DNC established a Division on Natural Resources and an Advisory Committee on Natural Resources under the newly formed Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), and encouraged state Democratic parties to appoint State Chairmen for Natural Resources. Programmatically, the DAC’s Committee on Natural Resources developed materials intended to inform the party’s positions articulated in the Party Platform of 1960, and the DNC generated natural resources policy content that was published in the party’s magazine, the Democratic Digest. Approaching the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections, the DNC Natural Resources Division produced campaign materials lambasting the Eisenhower administration’s conservation policies and claiming the mantle of conservation. With this activity, the Democratic party politicized an issue heretofore perceived to be apolitical and initiated an era of environmental politics characterized by partisan conflict over environmental issues. This historical account situates contemporary partisan polarization on the environment by exposing its mid-century origins and prompts us to reconsider our narrative of environmental history by showing that conservation was a partisan issue before the dawn of the environmental movement and the rise of Reagan.

Policing Project

This research project is based on 3.5 years of ethnographic research at the Albuquerque Police Department. As a high-ranking civilian employee (I reported directly to the Deputy Chief of the Accountability Bureau) working on police reform, I oversaw all police training, co-developed training on high liability subjects, like use of force, internal affairs investigations, and community policing, and oversaw Training Academy compliance with the federal consent decree. This position gave me unprecedented access for an academic researcher to the day-to-day workings of a police department under a federal consent decree. My research on policing opens the black box of police agencies, connects on-the-ground practices to overarching questions about police legitimacy, and examines the mechanics, successes, and challenges of federal oversight. My research agenda comprises a monograph and four articles at present.

Monograph

Behind the Thin Blue Line: Policing and American Democracy

This monograph explores the dilemmas of contemporary American policing. It is telescopic in structure, beginning with an overarching view of the role of policing in American Democracy and moving down into on-the-ground questions of police administration and police practice informed by my 3.5 years working for the Albuquerque Police Department. After introducing foundational questions about the role of the police in the American polity and presenting a succinct history of the evolution of policing in the United States, I dedicate chapters to core dilemmas in policing:

• police administration—the relationship of police agencies to municipal democratic institutions, the unique characteristics of police agencies as municipal bureaucracies, and the architecture and function of police agencies as institutions;
• police policy—the process of creating and reviewing department standard operating procedures (SOPs), the ways that these SOPs are enforced, and the relationship between formal rules and informal norms;
• police training—the aims of training, the way training is implemented, and the relationship between training and performance;
• use of force—its relationship to law, the translation of law into SOP, and the implementation of SOP on the street;
• internal accountability mechanisms—the roles and functions of internal affairs investigations, and the means and aims of the disciplinary system;
• performance management—managing performance proactively, the integral role of supervision, and performance management platforms; and
• police unions—their functions for their members, and their political functions.

In each of these chapters, I will examine the ways that consent decrees intervene in police agency structure and function and the challenges of federal oversight at the agency level. I will conclude with a reflection on the relationship between these concrete dilemmas of policing and the role of policing in a democratic polity.

Articles

“Police Accountability Through Consent Decrees: The Case of the Albuquerque Police Department” 

Abstract: This article examines the concrete ways in which consent decrees aim to increase police accountability. I theorize that mechanisms of accountability can be categorized as formal/informal and internal/external and argue that consent decrees are external attempts to shape internal formal and informal mechanisms of accountability through targeted changes to police agency practices as well as more amorphous efforts to shape police agency culture and norms. I use the case of the Albuquerque Police Department to illustrate this effort, highlighting both the successes of and limits to federal intervention.

“Police Use of Force from Law to Practice” 

Abstract: This article demystifies police use of force by explaining how police force is shaped by case law translated into police department standard operating procedures. I use the case of the Albuquerque Police Department to illustrate this translation and to illuminate how federal oversight in the form of a consent decree shaped the Department’s use of force policy over ten years. I argue that constraining police use of force requires adopting additional national legal constraints, that consent decrees are a piecemeal attempt to bind police departments to the law, and that training and internal accountability mechanisms are essential for keeping individual officer actions within the bounds of the law.

“Pathologies of Police Administration” 

Abstract: Police agencies are both unique and mundane as municipal administrative agencies. Police agencies are distinct as public sector organizations in that their agents are empowered to act as the physically coercive arm of the state. Police may interfere with fundamental liberties, they may kill. At the same time, policing is plagued with common administrative pathologies—organizational inefficiencies, failures of effective supervision, inadequate training, political interference, corruption. This article examines police departments as administrative agencies, drawing out how their administrative behavior is shaped by and shapes their unique authorities and also highlighting the ways in which common administrative pathologies are refracted in the police agency environment. The article concludes by arguing that police agency administration must be held to a higher bar given the role of policing in a democratic polity.

“Theorizing Police Use of Force” 

Abstract: Academic work on policing is almost universally empirical, though the function of police goes to the core of democracy. This article begins with the paradox, posed by Herman Goldstein, that in a democracy the police function is necessary to secure individual safety, yet police are given awesome authorities that allow them to intrude on individual freedom. This authority to intrude is delegated to individual officers on the street and, at its extreme, includes the ability to execute individuals. How is this paradox negotiated? I use case law on police use of force as a frame for interrogating the role of police in a democratic polity.

Non-Academic Article

“Police Training: How to Do it Right”

This piece will offer best practices for police training based on my experience developing and overseeing police training at a large municipal police agency.

Political Parties and American Political Development Project

My co-authored scholarship with Adam Hilton (Mount Holyoke College) emerged out of a shared interest in U.S. party development and frustration with the limits of contemporary parties scholarship in explaining party change over time. We argue that an American Political Development approach to parties offers analytical purchase on party development and change by focusing on parties as institutions.

We first asserted that political parties are distinctive political institutions in that they mediate state and society relationships in democratic polities, and, in doing so, make democracy possible. This locus imbues them with contentiousness, as both state and societal actors seek to use parties to achieve their ends. Political entrepreneurs construct, consolidate, and maintain institutional and ideational party orders to manage contention, win elections, and govern. By focusing on party orders as a meso level of analysis, situated between the political regime and party system above and mass partisans below, we are able to track and explain both party development and change, which we theorize as occurring across five dimensions of party: institutions, interests, issues, ideology, and identity. This party orders approach allows us to explain asymmetric party development, including, crucially, asymmetric polarization and the Republican party’s authoritarian turn, despite both parties being shaped by the same structural (regime and system-level) forces.

This theoretical work has been published in “Bringing contention in: a critical perspective on political parties as institutions” (Studies in Political Economy) and in the introduction to our edited volume, Parties, Power, and Change: Developmental Approaches to American Party Politics, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. We are currently working on a revise and resubmit for a second article that applies this theoretical framework to explain the asymmetric development of U.S. political parties and plan to co-author a monograph in the future.

Article in Revision

“Contentious Institutions and Party Orders in American Politics”

Abstract: Why, despite his electoral liabilities and authoritarian inclinations, was Donald Trump able to consolidate control over the Republican Party? Why, despite his avowed centrism and razor-thin majorities, did Joe Biden attempt the most ambitious progressive policy agenda since the 1960s? To answer these puzzles, we argue that it is necessary to go beyond existing politician- and group-centered models of U.S. political parties, recasting them as contentious institutions subject to rival claims from both politicians and groups. To manage contention, entrepreneurs construct and maintain party orders—durable constellations of institutions, interests, issues, ideologies, and identities—which repurpose, reform, and displace inherited party legacies. By foregrounding the dynamics of contention in the rise and fall of party orders over time, our contentious orders approach combines a universalistic theory of parties with a historically-grounded approach to analyzing their development and the asymmetrical mix of continuity and change shaping American politics in the present.

Future Research

A future research project will examine American agriculture as a site of contestation over the meaning of American democracy. The inspiration for this project grew out of teaching food politics and my experience living in Eugene, Oregon, one of the most food-conscious cities in the country. American agriculture has undergone extraordinary changes over the twentieth century. A full picture of these changes comprises three interlocking parts: the development of federal agricultural policy, the corporatization and consolidation of the agricultural sector, and the increasing disconnection of American citizens to agricultural production. These three shifts seem to present a deterministic picture of Americans slowly ceding the ability to shape the place of food in their lives—what I call food agency—over the past century. But the narrative driven by macro changes is only one side of the story. Against this historical context of increasingly technocratic federal intervention, consolidation of corporate power, and alienation of citizens from agriculture, we can find, throughout American history, moments of push-back in which citizen groups endeavor to reclaim the ability to make decisions about their relationships to food. In addition to providing a rich historical narrative about these developments, this project will examine how these developments have enacted a politics of diminishing democracy that has generated political resistance. Concretely, these moments of resistance and re-articulation of food democracy manifest in, for example, Agrarian Populism centered in the Plains states at the end of the 19^th century, the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA in the late 1960s, and the urban farming movement in American cities like Detroit in the 2000s. In these moments of contestation, we can see a historical dialogue about the place of agriculture in American democracy in response to overarching trends of bureaucratization, consolidation, and alienation. This dialogue about the theory and practice of American agriculture and its place in American life is a space in which the ideal of agrarian democracy is contested, reimagined, enacted, and transformed, and, I argue, it provides a window into the workings of American democracy writ large. Methodologically, this project will utilize archival research and interpretive discourse analysis to examine how historical and contemporary food movements have constructed alternative visions of agrarian democracy in the face of large-scale agricultural change.