Research

How do police and teachers unions affect attitudes towards labor policy? This study consists of a survey experiment featuring a news blurb about a fictional collective bargaining (CB) referendum in the respondent’s home state. Modeled after a real world attempt in Utah, respondents read about an attempt by their state’s legislature to ban collective bargaining for public sector unions followed by a citizen-led petition to revisit the bill via a referendum. Respondents read one of four versions of the article varying the inclusion of no endorsement, an endorsement by either the National Education Association state chapter or the Fraternal Order of Police chapter, or both. By randomizing the focus between police and teachers’ unions, the study will seek to determine whether these two unions provide an ideological signal that causes a change in participants’ attitudes about public sector CB, along with exploratory effects on attitudes towards a broader set of labor rights and unions as moderated by self-identified ideology. This study demonstrates how polarization on local policing and education unions and policy may translate to a change in voter attitudes on broader labor policy. This study also focuses on a unique policy setting where “strange bedfellow” unions across the ideological and partisan spectrum may successfully change policy by strategically targeting allied voters. 

Violence against women in politics (VAWIP) is a pervasive problem affecting politically active women worldwide, exposing how gendered power operates through and within political institutions. Leading solutions emphasize protect, punish, and prepare strategies that reproduce mainstream responses to violence against women (VAW). Drawing on critical  feminist theory and VAW scholarship, we argue that these solutions lean toward benevolent  sexism, carceral feminism, and white feminism, leaving intact the interlocking systems of subordination that produce violence. Alternatively, we propose a survivor-centered framework rooted in the feminist principles of contextuality, collective action, and intersectionality. We develop this framework through feminist assessments of Title IX that reveal how conventional strategies perpetuate harm. From these assessments, we identify survivor-centered strategies—accessibility, accountability, and alternatives—and apply them to VAWIP to generate survivorcentered solutions. We then track survivorcentered practice in ACOBOL, a Bolivian women politicians’ association, finding meaningful but incomplete progress, and draw on transformative justice work in the United States to address these gaps. We argue that anti-VAWIP researchers and practitioners should center a survivor-centered framework in both scholarship and practice.

How do protests affect police responsiveness? Local governments delegate power to the police as the primary overseers of domestic law and order, especially during periods of upheaval. The police themselves can be individual or collective political actors, and both their institutions and street-level behaviors have been the targets of protest movements. This paper analyzes variation in employee absenteeism for members of the Minneapolis Police Department as a function of the prevalence and political issues of local protests. Results show that protest waves can both mobilize and demobilize police officers, depending on the window of time considered. In the long run, policing-issue protests in the summer of 2020 generated significant long-term increases in rates of paid absences among sworn MPD personnel. In the short term, the days of and days immediately following policing protests are associated with a significant decrease in officers’ paid absence rates, indicating greater mobilization at the margins. Civilian personnel’s absence patterns are unchanged by protest occurrences. Of all prominent and recurrent political issues featured at Minneapolis protests between 2017 and 2025, only policing-issue protests persistently cause short-term changes in absenteeism. These results are robust to controlling for blue centered protest characteristics such as crowd size, arrests, injuries, and damages, along with COVID-19 case rates. The results help explain how protest-caused demobilization such as the Blue Flu and work slowdowns can coexist with prior evidence suggesting protests as mobilization mechanisms, with the same protest events both pushing and pulling officers from the front lines.