Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at The Ohio State University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in May 2023. In 2023–2024 I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Possibility Lab at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.

My scholarship sits at the nexus of race, institutions, and political behavior, often focusing on the politics of the criminal legal system in the United States. One strand of my research demonstrates the institutional insulation of municipal police from public influence and democratic oversight; another considers questions of representation for racial and ethnic minorities. My work appears in the American Political Science Review, Political Psychology, and Political Behavior, and in the Oxford University Press book Deadly Justice.

Publications

  1. Willing but Unable: Reassessing the Relationship between Racial Group Consciousness and Black Political Participation, with Jasmine Carrera Smith, Jared Clemons, Miguel Martinez, Leann McLaren, and Ismail K. White. American Political Science Review (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    In this article, we offer a framework for understanding the role that racial group consciousness (RGC) plays in influencing Black Americans’ engagement in costly political action. Attempting to add clarity to decades of inconsistent and at times contradictory findings, we argue that the effect of RGC at inspiring political action among Black Americans is conditional on (1) the relevance of the political activity to achieving a well-recognized racial group outcome and(2) individual capacity to assume the cost of engaging in the activity. Analyzing data from the ANES and two behavioral experiments, we find that RGC exhibits a consistently strong relationship with engagement in low-cost political behavior, regardless of whether the behavior has some explicit group-relevant outcome. When engagement becomes more costly, however, Blacks high in RGC are only willing to assume these costs if the engagement has some clear potential for racial group benefit.

  2. Do At-Large Elections Reduce Black Representation? A New Baseline for County Legislatures, with Jason Douglas Todd and Curtis Bram. Electoral Studies (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Much work has shown that, at all levels, Black citizens tend to be descriptively underrepresented in government. We take up the question of Black descriptive representation at the level of the county legislature, gathering data on the composition of North Carolina’s 100 county commissions. We propose an alternative measure of descriptive representation, termed “seats above expectation”, and apply a counterfactual simulation approach to gauge the effects of at-large and ward-based elections. We find that Black citizens are underrepresented statewide: there are four fewer Black county commissioners than we would expect, based on the current county board sizes, demographics, and institutional arrangements. However, we find that universal implementation of ward-based elections would increase the statewide total of Black county commissioners by 20 in expectation, a 17% increase over the baseline. Because our methodological approach does not require a natural experiment or policy change, scholars can estimate average treatment effects (ATEs) of ward-based elections on minority descriptive representation across a wider array of locales.

  3. The Donor Went Down to Georgia: Out-of-District Donations and Rivalrous Representation, with Charles Nathan, Curtis Bram, and Jason Todd. Political Behavior (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Most of the money spent in U.S. congressional campaigns comes from donors residing outside the race’s electoral district. Scholars argue that legislators accepting out-of-district donations become “surrogate representatives” for outside donors. Yet researchers have neglected a critical question: How do geographic constituents react when their representatives accept money from outside donors? We argue that geographic constituents feel forced to share their representatives with out-of-district donors at the expense of their own representation. In an experiment during the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, we found that Georgians who learned about out-of-district donations to particular candidates expected their senator to spend significantly less time and effort working for the interest of Georgians. A follow-up experiment during the 2022 U.S. Senate elections identified local identity as a moderating variable. Relative to those receiving no prime, respondents whose local identity was primed and who learned about out-of-district donations expected their senator to spend less time and effort working for geographic constituents. Our findings highlight the rivalrous nature of representation and the trade-offs accompanying out-of-district donations and surrogate representation.

  4. The Mobilizing Effects of Proposition 47 on High-Incarceration Communities. Political Psychology (2025). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Existing research disagrees about whether community exposure to the carceral state mobilizes or demobilizes nearby voters. I argue the missing link is whether voting is clearly connected to changing criminal-legal policy, and use California’s well-publicized 2014 Proposition 47—which reduced incarceration and lowered sanctions for nonviolent offenses—as a test. Using census-tract vote returns and incarceration rates, I find that higher tract incarceration is associated with increased turnout in the Proposition 47 election and with greater support for the reform measure.

  5. The Punitive Public? Exploring the Opinion–Election Connection in Criminal Justice Policy, with Curtis Bram and Charles Nathan. American Politics Research (2025). [PDF]
    Abstract

    A long tradition links US criminal-legal policy to public attitudes, with one proposed mechanism being a punitive public electing punitive politicians. Using three conjoint experiments, we show that citizens’ policy attitudes do not map neatly onto their electoral choices: respondents broadly agree about which classes of offenders most deserve release—across party and levels of racial resentment—but that consensus fractures along partisan and racial-resentment lines once the same choices are attached to hypothetical candidates. We argue scholars should focus more on the mechanisms connecting opinion to criminal-justice outcomes.

Working Papers

Work in Progress

Book

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a comprehensive examination of the record established through 40 years of experience with the modern death penalty. The book asks whether the system the Supreme Court approved in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) has worked as intended, or whether caprice, bias, and arbitrariness continue to characterize its application — bringing empirical evidence to bear on cost, delay, geographic concentration, reversals, and botched executions.

The work was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Jordan v. Mississippi (2018), and is used to teach Race, Innocence, and the End of the Death Penalty at UNC-Chapel Hill. Replication data and reviews are available online.

Law Review Articles & Chapters

  1. The Geographic Distribution of US Executions, with Frank R. Baumgartner, Wallace Gram, and Kaneesha Johnson. Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 11: 1–33 (2016).
    Abstract

    We review statistical patterns in the geographic distribution of US executions, compare them to homicides, and document an extreme and increasing degree of concentration in the modern period that is virtually uncorrelated with homicide-related factors. The distribution follows a pattern associated with self-reinforcing processes: a main determinant of whether an individual is executed is not the crime committed but the jurisdiction’s prior experience with executing others.

  2. The Transparency of Jail Data, with Will Crozier and Brandon Garrett. Wake Forest Law Review (2021).
    Abstract

    Using scraped daily pretrial data from Durham, North Carolina, we examine outcomes following 2019 bail-policy changes. The jail population declined sharply and aggregate pretrial conditions shifted. We also show why public data reporting only initial pretrial conditions cannot answer key questions about jail populations or released-population outcomes, and discuss the implications for bail reform.

  3. COVID-19, Race, and Mass Incarceration. Chapter 4 in COVID-19 and Racial Inequality, ed. Sandy Darity (2022).
    Abstract

    This chapter examines the relationship between COVID-19 and mass incarceration: how the pandemic affected pretrial detention and prison-release policies, the relatively small magnitude of population decreases, the elevated likelihood of contracting COVID-19 inside prisons, and how racialized mass incarceration contributed to racial inequality in the pandemic’s effects.

Public Writing

Teaching