Research
Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Electing amateur politicians reduces cross-party collaborationRachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Mackenzie R. DobsonThe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Forthcoming
Public trust in democratic institutions is essential for effective governance, yet global confidence in them has fallen to unprecedented lows. In response, electorates in major democracies are increasingly turning away from career politicians and toward “amateurs"—politicians without prior elective office-holding experience—hoping that these outsiders can disrupt partisan gridlock and elite entrenchment. Using the United States Congress as a critical case, we evaluate this expectation by linking over four decades of election data with 2.2 million records of bill sponsorship and cosponsorship. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that electing political amateurs to public office significantly \textitintensifies partisan divisions rather than alleviates them. Compared to retaining incumbents and/or sending experienced freshmen to Congress, electing amateurs yields representatives who attract fewer opposing-party collaborators to their own bills and offer less support to the other party’s legislation. This pattern is concerning because cross-party coalitions remain critical for functional governance in the U.S. and beyond, even amidst party polarization. We therefore caution against the premise that political outsiders can readily fix political dysfunction.
- The Consequences of Elite Action Against ElectionsRachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, Emily Anderson, and 3 more authorsThe British Journal of Political Science, Forthcoming
Do elites who engage in undemocratic practices face democratic accountability? We investigate whether American state legislators who publicly acted against the 2020 presidential election outcome sustained meaningful sanctions in response. We theorize that accountability for undemocratic activities is \textitselective—conspicuous, highly visible efforts to undermine democratic institutions face the strongest ramifications from voters, politicians, and parties. In contrast, other, less prominent actions elicit weaker responses. Our empirical analyses employ novel data on state legislators’ anti-election actions and a weighting method for covariate balance to estimate the magnitude of accountability for undemocratic behavior. The results evidence heterogeneity, with the strongest consequences targeting legislators who appeared at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and weaker penalties for legislators who engaged in other antagonism toward democracy. We conclude that focusing sanctions on conspicuous acts against democratic institutions could leave less apparent—but still detrimental—efforts to undermine elections unchecked, ultimately weakening democratic health.
- Conceptualizing and Measuring Early Campaign Fundraising in Congressional ElectionsColin R. Case, and Rachel PorterPolitical Science Research & Methods, Forthcoming
Political professionals and scholars maintain that raising money early in the election season is critical to a successful campaign, having downstream consequences on a candidate’s future fundraising potential, the stiffness of competition she will face, and her likelihood of electoral victory. In spite of early money’s perceived importance, there is no common operationalization for money as “early.” Moreover, existing measures often fail to reflect definitional aspects of early money. In this paper, we first lay out a theoretical framework regarding the utility of early campaign fundraising for candidates. We argue that early fundraising can be expressed as two conceptually-district quantities of interest centered on either a candidate’s own fundraising performance (candidate-centered) or her fundraising performance relative to her electoral competitors (election-centered). We next lay out steps for operationalizing candidate- and election-centered measures of early fundraising. Lastly, we demonstrate that both our proposed measures for early campaign fundraising are predictive of a candidate’s future fundraising and electoral success. By putting forward a set of best practices for early money measurement and, additionally, producing off-the-shelf measures for early fundraising in U.S. House elections, we fill an important gap in scholarly research on the measurement of money in politics.
- CampaignView, a database of policy platforms and biographical narratives for congressional candidatesRachel Porter, Colin R. Case, and Sarah A. TreulNature-Scientific Data, 2025
Thousands of candidates run for the U.S. Congress each election season, yet we lack systematic information on the vast majority of these contenders. Consequently, fundamental questions about polarization, agenda-setting, and representation remain unanswered. We introduce CampaignView, a database of campaign platforms and biographical narratives drawn from congressional campaign websites. Our corpus covers 5,228 candidates, representing 86.9% of major-party, ballot-eligible contenders who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives between 2018 and 2022. Our text data was collected in real-time during each election cycle, parsed into relevant units of aggregation, and manually annotated for topical coverage. In sum, our data includes 43,465 platform points and 5,114 biographical narratives. We provide auxiliary information on candidates and their electoral contexts to supplement our data. We host data for public dissemination at https://campaignview.org. Information is crucial to a well-functioning democracy; the open-access tools and data we produce have broad utility for journalists, advocacy groups, voters, and researchers seeking information on congressional campaigns.
- Evaluating (In)Experience in Congressional ElectionsRachel Porter, and Sarah A. TreulAmerican Journal of Political Science, 2025
From the 1980s to the mid-2010s, nearly three-quarters of members newly elected to the US House of Representatives had previous elected experience; however, only half of the freshmen elected from 2016 to 2020 held prior office. In this article, we investigate emergence- and success-driven explanations for the declining proportion of experienced officeholders entering Congress. In our analyses, we find that the advantages traditionally afforded to experienced candidates are waning. First, we show that inexperienced candidates’ emergence patterns have changed; amateurs are increasingly apt to emerge in the same kinds of contests as their experienced counterparts. We then show that experienced candidates have lost their fundraising edge and that—for certain kinds of candidates—the value of elected experience itself has declined. Lastly, we identify other candidate characteristics as strong predictors for success in modern elections. We demonstrate that these electorally advantageous identities overwhelmingly belong to candidates who lack elected experience.
- Changing the Dialogue: Descriptive Candidacies and Position Taking in Campaigns for the US House of RepresentativesRachel Porter, Sarah A. Treul, and Maura McDonaldThe Journal of Politics, 2024
Although the benefits of increasing descriptive diversity in Congress are well explored, less attention has been paid to the positive impacts of increasing descriptive diversity in elections. Employing a comprehensive collection of campaign platform text from nearly 5,000 campaign websites, we find that Democratic male and white candidates are significantly more likely to take up women’s and Black-associated issues when a candidate who possesses that identity runs in their same-party primary election. Extending our analysis to military veterans, we find that Republicans are more likely to discuss veterans’ issues when there is a military veteran in their primary; conversely, Democrats are not any more likely to discuss these issues when they run against a veteran. Looking to candidate position taking in the general election, our f indings suggest that simply the presence of candidates from underrepresented populations in elections is important to broadening substantive representation in the legislative arena.
- No Experience Required: Early Donations and Amateur Candidate Success in Primary ElectionsRachel Porter, and Tyler S. SteelmanLegislative Studies Quarterly, 2022
The electoral dominance of “quality” candidates—political insiders with a history of holding office—is well-established. However, research on the recent rise in successful political neophytes is less studied. Despite longstanding trends in the predominance of experienced candidates in primary elections, nearly half of all quality candidates who ran in non-incumbent races lost to a candidate without prior electoral experience in 2018. In this article, we investigate the success of political newcomers in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives by examining a topic often overlooked in the growing literature on primaries: campaign finance. We show that, from 2016 to 2020, political newcomers saw (1) greater success in future fundraising, and (2) an increased likelihood of primary election victory when they garnered more early contributions from outside their district. This contrasts with prior elections, where early money from inside a candidate’s own congressional district served as the strongest predictor of future fundraising and electoral success.
- The Junior Americanist Workshop SeriesChristina Ladam, Austin Bussing, Alexander C. Furnas, and 3 more authorsPS: Political Science & Politics, 2022
- Running as a Woman? Candidate Presentation in the 2018 MidtermsMaura McDonald, Rachel Porter, and Sarah A. TreulPolitical Research Quarterly, 2020
The record high number of women who ran for the U.S. Congress during the midterm elections led many journalists to proclaim 2018 as another “Year of the Woman.” Although not every female candidate was successful, this large number of women running for office provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of the ways in which women present themselves to their voters. Using the “Biography” pages of more than 1,500 2018 congressional campaign websites, we use a structural topic model to examine how these candidates present themselves to their constituencies. In doing this, we find great variance in the presentation styles of women running for Congress in 2018. We also find that prior political experience, more so than gender, is the primary driver in influencing how candidates (both men and women) present themselves. Experienced candidates use similar styles that highlight their past political work while amateur candidates are more likely to use “values-driven” language.
Working Papers
- Strategic Heterogeneity in Policy-Level Positioning: Evidence from Congressional CampaignsColin R. Case, and Rachel PorterLast Updated: August 14, 2025
Measures for the policy positions of political actors are essential to testing foundational questions about political representation, partisan polarization, and electoral competition. Each election season, thousands of candidates run for the US Congress, yet we lack systematic information on the policy positions of the vast majority of these electoral contenders. To that end, we pair an original collection of campaign platforms with tools for machine learning to extract and scale latent policy positions within these texts. We produce novel estimates for the policy positions of candidates who ran for the US House of Representatives between 2018 and 2022 across multiple issues areas (e.g., guns, immigration, and abortion). Through a series of validation tests, we demonstrate that our Candidate Positioning Indexes (CPIs) reliably capture latent concepts of interest from text. To underscore the utility of our measures, we find evidence of variation in issue polarization at the party level, as well as multidimensionality in policy positioning at the candidate level.
- Intra-Party Variation on Climate Change Positions in U.S. House ElectionsRachel Porter, Ben Francis, and Bill KakenmasterLast Updated: January 24, 2025
Previous research documents partisan polarization on climate change in the United States extensively. However, little is known about intra-party variation in politicians’ positions on climate change. Using a word embeddings approach, we assess the relationship between position-taking on climate change and climate-relevant factors in congressional districts. We train our embeddings on a corpus of campaign platforms from U.S. House of Representatives candidates who ran between 2018 and 2022. We demonstrate that Republicans attribute extreme weather events to climate change more closely in districts with heightened climate-related disaster risk. We also demonstrate that Republicans support renewable energy investment conditional on district-level fossil fuel reliance. Democrats display remarkable consistency in their position-taking across all district-level factors. Our findings shed light on potential pro-climate congressional coalitions that might be formed in the future.
- Policy Facts or Partisan Friction?: Explaining Political Communication on America’s Opioid EpidemicRachel PorterLast Updated: September 9, 2024
Party messaging has become a central component of today’s political dialogue. However, not all issues can be so easily employed to facilitate partisan messaging goals. To assess how politicians define and dramatize party distinctions over issues for which party stances are not immediately clear, I turn to America’s opioid epidemic. Assessing the topical content of opioid issue text from an original collection of congressional campaign platforms, I find the local salience of the opioid crisis to be highly predictive of politicians’ messaging behavior. Candidates from districts with a relatively high rate of opioid deaths tend to focus their opioid issue positions on CDC-endorsed public-health solutions for the crisis; alternatively, candidates from districts with a relatively low rate of opioid deaths use opioid messaging opportunities as a vehicle to purport party-defining issues that have only loose ties to America’s opioid epidemic. Pairing a novel method for multi-corpora topic modeling with text from bill summaries, floor speeches, and press releases about opioid issues, I find that incumbents carry forward their campaign messaging behaviors to Congress. These results suggest that rhetoric from political elites plays a pivotal role in perpetuating harmful stigmas about addiction, and discourages treatment-seeking behaviors.
Works in Progress
- Bipartisan campaign messages are credible policymaking signalsColin R. Case, Emily Cottle Ommundsen, and Rachel PorterPresented at the 2024 Conference for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia
Congressional candidates frequently navigate complex strategic decisions about when and how to employ bipartisan messaging in their campaigns. While bipartisanship is generally favored by voters, excessive use can incur electoral costs. This study explores candidates’ strategic deployment of bipartisan appeals across specific policy areas, examining the credibility of these appeals as predictors of future legislative behavior. Analyzing campaign communications from candidate websites (2018–2022) alongside legislative actions from the 116th to 118th Congress, we demonstrate that bipartisan campaigning typically occurs selectively across distinct policy issues rather than as a broad legislative style. Empirical results reveal that candidates’ bipartisan messaging in specific policy areas significantly predicts their future bipartisan legislative activity, particularly in sponsorship and original co-sponsorship of legislation. Thus, despite prevailing partisan polarization, bipartisan messaging remains a credible indicator of subsequent bipartisan cooperation in Congress, driven by strategic calculations balancing electoral incentives and policy objectives.
- Do Small Donors Make a Big Difference in U.S. Elections?: Evidence from 50 Million Campaign ContributionsMaggie Macdonald, Rachel Porter, and Megan BrownPresented at the 2024 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting
This paper leverages 50 million small and large contributions to 2020 and 2022 congressional campaigns, linked to a national voter file and geolocated to the donor’s congressional district. With these data, we examine the political value of small-dollar donors to candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that while the small-dollar donorate is large in scale, its financial power is relatively weak compared to the broader donor pool. We next evaluate the efficacy of small donor matching programs in elevating the voices of small donors, who more often belong to groups underrepresented in politics. We find that matching programs broadly improve candidates’ fundraising potential, but less than a third of candidates meet eligibility requirements. Importantly, public financing programs drastically marginalize the financial power of donors from within a candidate’s own district— who already feel overlooked in modern politics.