Projects
jhkirkla@email.unc.edu
In this project, I demonstrate that decisions made by state legislators about which neighborhoods to redistrict are a function of the partisan makeup and general wealth of a block group. Strategic political parties with multiple goals will attempt to retain wealthy neighborhoods in addition to highly partisan neighborhoods in order to lighten the fundraising burden felt by candidates during elections.This paper is currently under review at Legislative Studies Quarterly.
"Committee Chairs, Experience and Agenda Setting in State Legislative Committees" with Jeff Harden
In this project, we study variance in the power of committee chairs to control the agenda's of their respective committees. We hypothesize that while committee chairmanship always brings with it some agenda control advantages, some chairs are better able to control their committees than others because of advantages they accrue through seniority. We use committee output from several state legislatures to assess the degree to which there is variance in agenda control in committees and compare likely sources of that variance and find that seniority does confer additional advantages to committee chairs.
"Policy Agendas, Party Control and PAC Contributions in the American States" with Virginia Gray and David Lowery
This project is an effort to better understand the purpose and motivation of Political Action Committees' donations to candidates. Access accounts might lead us to believe that the more control of a legislature a party wields, the more money PACs will donate to that party. We hypothesize an additional interaction between party control and agenda size in that as agenda size increases more groups are mobilized and even more money is donated to majority parties. Thus majority parties gain more from certain sectors of groups when they are active on that sector's agenda.
In this paper, we examine how health PAC activity in the states is connected to lobbying. We examine the relationship between campaign contributions and lobby activity and the limited work that has been conducted on them and raise a number of questions about the process by which they are connected. We utilize 1998 data on state lobbying and PAC activity, allowing us to answer causal research questions generated from existing studies at the national level. We conclude that PAC activity is best viewed as an adjunct of lobbying rather than an independent form of political activity. This paper is published at Publius: The Journal of Federalism vol. 39 no.1 pages 70-94.
"Mediated Density: The Indirect Relationship Between Public Policy and PACs" with Virginia Gray, David Lowery, Mary Deason, Jennifer Sykes and Jenny Benz
In this paper, we examine how common measures of PAC activity like issue saliency, actually impact PAC formations. In light of earlier work indicating that PACs are an extenions of the lobbying community rather than an independent system, we hypothesize that issue saliency will only impact PAC formation indirectly. Path analysis provides clear support for the notion that issue saliency impacts the aggregate PAC system in a state through the state's lobbying community and saliency provides no direct influence on PAC formations. This paper is currently under review at Party Politics.
"The Relational Determinants of Legislative Success"
In this project (one of the chapters in my dissertation project), I demonstrate that relationships between legislators, measured by cosponsorship on bills, are important determinants of bill success in state legislatures. Additionally, all relationships between legislators are not equal. Using social networks techniques I demonstrate that, contrary to intuition, the weakest ties a legislator has to other members in the chamber are the best determinants of bill success. Legislators who are tied very strongly to one another have many latent similarities, such that a bill author has no reason to attempt to influence those with whom the author shares a strong tie. It is the weak ties a legislator holds to other chamber members who are most dissimilar to the author that provide the greatest avenues for influence diffusion. Thus, by increasing the number of legislators to whom an author has a weak tie, the author's influence spreads independently of latent similarities between legislators.
Home