Mackenzie R. Dobson

Hello! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Government at the University of Virginia and a Visiting Scholar in the Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I am also a Graduate Affiliate with the Center for Effective Lawmaking.

I am on the 2025–2026 academic job market.

My published and forthcoming work appears in the British Journal of Political Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

I study American political institutions with a focus on legislative politics, representation, and effective lawmaking. My research advances two interconnected lines of inquiry: first, I investigate how parties, legislative rules, and institutional capacity structure opportunities for bipartisan collaboration and effective lawmaking; second, I examine how voters and the media evaluate elites’ behavior and identities in ways that shape representation, accountability, and public trust. I am a quantitative social scientist and regularly employ big data, social network analysis, and computational methods in my research.

My dissertation, Asymmetric Bipartisanship: Conditional Cooperation and the Limits of Legislative Reciprocity, examines the causes and consequences of bipartisan collaboration in U.S. state legislatures. I seek to understand what allows for bipartisan collaboration, and alternatively, what forces disrupt it. In our current era of intense two-party conflict, understanding what can get our lawmakers to work together across party lines is more important than ever, especially considering that the alternative to bipartisan compromise is gridlock.