Mackenzie R. Dobson, Ph.D.

American Politics · Legislatures · Effective Lawmaking · Representation

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My research centers on bipartisan collaboration, effective lawmaking, and political representation in American legislatures. I study how legislators build relationships across party lines, how those relationships shape policymaking and legislative success, and what these dynamics mean for democratic representation. To do so, I combine original data collection with large-scale observational data and employ quantitative and computational methods.

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

Previously, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Virginia.

Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Research Affiliate, Center for Effective Lawmaking

Research Affiliate, Portman Center for Policy Solutions

research

Published

Selective Reciprocity in Bipartisan Collaboration: How Majority Security Shapes Legislative Success

State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2026

Mackenzie R. Dobson

abstract pdf html

Best Graduate Student Paper on State Politics, State Politics & Policy Conference 2025 Best Poster Presentation on State Politics, State Politics & Policy Conference 2024 CEL Working Paper Series

How does majority party security shape reciprocal bipartisan collaboration and influence legislative success? US state legislatures vary widely in the stability of majority control, offering a valuable opportunity to examine how party security conditions the incentives for cross-party collaboration. Insecure majorities may foster reciprocity as both a behavioral norm and a strategic path to legislative advancement, while long-term one-party control can diminish the returns to bipartisan engagement. I develop a theory of selective reciprocity, arguing that majority security fundamentally restructures how legislators engage in and benefit from bipartisan collaboration. Drawing on data from 401,720 bills introduced across 43 state legislatures between 2009 and 2018, I construct novel measures of bipartisan collaboration to evaluate reciprocity. I find that minority party legislators build reputational capital by consistently cosponsoring majority party bills – but their efforts yield few legislative gains in secure majority chambers. Instead, majority legislators selectively reciprocate only on minority party initiatives unlikely to pass, preserving the appearance of cooperation while protecting their policy agenda. By contrast, in insecure chambers, bipartisan cooperation is more likely to produce substantive outcomes. Reciprocity endures but is constrained – selective in form, asymmetric in effect, and structured by the institutional advantages of majority control. These findings raise broader concerns about the marginalization of minority party legislators and the limits of representation under conditions of majority security.

The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections

British Journal of Political Science, 2025

Emily E. Anderson, Mackenzie R. Dobson, and Jeffrey J. Harden

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Do governing elites who engage in undemocratic practices face 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 selective — conspicuous, highly visible efforts to undermine democratic institutions face the strongest ramifications from voters, politicians, and parties. In contrast, less prominent actions elicit weaker responses. Our results evidence heterogeneity, with the strongest consequences targeting legislators who appeared at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and weaker penalties for lawmakers who engaged in other antagonism toward democracy.

Electing Amateur Politicians Reduces Cross-Party Collaboration

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025

Rachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Mackenzie R. Dobson

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Public trust in democratic institutions has dropped to historic lows, prompting electorates in major democracies to turn to "amateur" politicians with the expectation that these political outsiders will cut through stalemates to deliver policy results. Amateurs are often seen as pragmatic "doers," but also uncompromising, a combination at odds with governing systems where legislative progress depends on cross-party coalitions. Using the US Congress as a critical case, we evaluate these competing expectations by linking over four decades of election data with 2.2 million bill (co)sponsorship records. We find that electing amateurs intensifies partisan divisions: Districts that send amateurs to Congress yield representatives who attract fewer opposing-party collaborators to their bills and less often support other-party legislation.

I'm Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers

PS: Political Science & Politics, 2025

Jacob M. Lollis and Mackenzie R. Dobson

abstract pdf html dataverse

CEL Working Paper Series

Are LGBTQ legislators effective lawmakers? We build on theories that link voter discrimination to legislative effectiveness by arguing that voters' biases against LGBTQ candidates narrow the candidate pool, leading to the election of only the most experienced and qualified LGBTQ candidates. As a result of this electoral selection effect, we expect that LGBTQ legislators will be more effective lawmakers than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. To test this, we combine data on state legislators' LGBTQ identification with their State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES). Our findings reveal that LGBTQ legislators are meaningfully more effective than non-LGBTQ legislators.

Under review

Congressional Bipartisanship Scores by Member and Issue Area, 1983–2024

Mackenzie R. Dobson and Jacob M. Lollis

abstract pdf

CEL Working Paper Series

Although bipartisanship is central to legislative behavior and often necessary for policymaking success, no centralized, publicly accessible dataset tracks legislators' propensity to offer and attract cross-party support across time and policy issue areas. We introduce a dataset of congressional bipartisanship scores for all members of the U.S. House and Senate from 1983 to 2024. Built from more than 2.4 million cosponsorship decisions on 147,669 bills, the dataset provides two complementary member-term measures. To facilitate broad reuse among academics, researchers, journalists, legislators, and the public, we make the dataset available through Harvard Dataverse and a corresponding R package, 'biparty.'

Legislative Professionalism and Perceptions of White-Collar Government

Mackenzie R. Dobson, Jacob M. Lollis, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Justin H. Kirkland

abstract pdf conditionally accepted, Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy

The professionalization of American state legislatures is among the most consequential modern institutional reforms in legislative politics. Yet a core tension persists: citizens disapprove of professionalized legislatures even though these chambers possess capacity-enhancing resources—such as staff support, higher salaries, and longer sessions—that may improve representation and policymaking. We offer one explanation for this disapproval: citizens perceive professional legislatures as dominated by legislators from white-collar backgrounds. Consequently, we argue that opposition to professionalism stems, in part, from a belief that white-collar legislators may not represent society's interests broadly.

Congressional Attention to Abortion After Dobbs: How Representational and Electoral Incentives Selectively Shape Issue Attention

Jacob M. Lollis and Mackenzie R. Dobson

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Landmark Supreme Court rulings can reshape policy, rights, and public opinion, but their effects on congressional issue attention remain less clear. We argue that such rulings do not uniformly reshape congressional attention; instead, they do so selectively, depending on how legislators' representational and electoral incentives align. We test this argument in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). Using nearly 1.6M statements from U.S. House committee hearings, we leverage the leak of the draft opinion in a difference-in-differences design that estimates differential changes in abortion attention across party and gender.

Bipartisan Campaigners Become Effective Lawmakers

Mackenzie R. Dobson, Craig Volden, and Alan E. Wiseman

abstract pdf

CEL Working Paper Series

Strong evidence exists that effective lawmakers in one legislative term are very likely to be effective lawmakers in subsequent terms. But can voters glean insights into the likely lawmaking effectiveness of candidates even before they hold office? We examine the initial campaigns of more than 800 congressional Representatives and find that candidates who exhibited bipartisan traits during those campaigns became more effective lawmakers than those not identified as bipartisan.

Working papers

Policy Agendas and Effective Lawmaking in the American States

Andrew Ballard, Mackenzie R. Dobson, Martín Gandur, Craig Volden, and Alan E. Wiseman

abstract

The politics of public policymaking varies not only across institutions and over time but also across different issue areas. We leverage transformer-based text classification to accurately assign more than 1.6 million state bills to 18 different policy areas. We then introduce Issue-Specific State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (ISLES), enabling systematic, cross-state comparisons of lawmaking effectiveness by members of state legislatures at the issue level for 2009–2018, across 48 states.

Building Effective Coalitions in the American States

Mackenzie R. Dobson

abstract

CEL Working Paper Series

Bipartisan collaboration is widely considered a reliable route to legislative success, largely based on evidence from the contemporary U.S. Congress. Yet most state legislatures are governed by majority parties that occupy a significant share of chamber seats, permitting them to advance legislation without minority-party support. I argue that bipartisan collaboration enhances effectiveness only when cross-party support is necessary to assemble a winning coalition. Using State Legislative Effectiveness Scores and original measures of coalition-building, I show that bipartisanship enhances effectiveness in competitive chambers but not under secure majorities.

Does Training Legislators Improve Policymaking?

Mackenzie R. Dobson, Emma Schroeder, Daniel M. Butler, James M. Curry, Thad Kousser, and Jeffrey J. Harden

abstract pdf

Research on legislative behavior implies that manipulating institutional design and/or lawmaker characteristics to improve performance would pose practical difficulties and unpredictable consequences. We examine the efficacy of a more direct intervention on policymaking skill: legislator training. We theorize that educating politicians enhances lawmaking success via learning and network-based pathways. We test our expectations with two complementary research designs from American state legislatures. The first analyzes panel data spanning three decades of legislator participation in a national organization's regional training programs. Next, we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in participation in one regional program by comparing attending legislators to "no-shows" who were selected, but withdrew due to unforeseen exigencies. Our results indicate precisely-estimated negligible effects; returns to training do not appear in several measures of legislative success. We conclude that structural constraints overshadow individual talent in policymaking. The health of statehouse democracy depends more on institutional incentives than human capital development.

Procedural Rights and Minority Party Influence in American Legislatures

Géssica de Frietas, James M. Curry, and Mackenzie R. Dobson

Performative Bipartisanship: Symbolic Cross-Party Cooperation in an Era of Insecure Majorities

Mackenzie R. Dobson and Jacob M. Lollis

Data, Software, & Public Projects

I develop original datasets, open-source software, and interactive public tools for broad reuse by scholars, journalists, legislators, and the public. Replication materials for published papers are linked with each paper above.

biparty

Dobson & Lollis (2026) · R package v0.1.0 · MIT license

Explore data →

biparty is an R package providing Congressional Bipartisanship Scores (CBS) for every member of the U.S. House and Senate across the 98th through 118th Congresses (1983–2024). The package includes two datasets — aggregate.cbs and issue.area.cbs — and a suite of functions for member lookup, ranking, trend analysis, issue-area filtering, and visualization. Scores capture two complementary dimensions of cross-party behavior: attract (the share of out-party original cosponsors drawn to a member's own bills) and offer (the share of a member's cosponsorships directed toward out-party-sponsored bills). Both measures are available overall and within 34 Congressional Research Service policy areas, in weighted and unweighted variants. Built from 2.4 million cosponsorship decisions on 147,669 bills, the dataset covers 2,056 unique legislators and 11,549 member-term observations.

2,056

unique legislators

11,549

member-term obs.

CRS policy areas

98th–118th

Congresses

working paper (pdf) R documentation

State Legislative Bipartisanship Scores

Dobson (2026) · Harvard Dataverse · State Politics & Policy Quarterly

Explore data →

The State Legislative Bipartisanship Scores (SLBS) provide original measures of bipartisan collaboration for 10,817 legislators serving in 43 U.S. state legislatures between 2009 and 2018. Comprising 27,129 legislator-term observations, the dataset captures two complementary dimensions of bipartisan engagement: the extent to which legislators support bills introduced by members of the opposite party and the extent to which they attract support from across party lines on their own legislation. Drawing on millions of bill sponsorship and cosponsorship relationships, the measures provide a comparable framework for studying bipartisan behavior across states, chambers, parties, and legislative contexts.

27,129

Legislator-term obs.

State legislatures

Chambers

2009–2018

Time series

Harvard Dataverse paper (pdf)

Additional projects will be listed here as they are released.

Media & Mentions

Center for Effective Lawmaking · June 15, 2026

Congressional Bipartisanship Scores by Member and Issue Area, 1983–2024

The Center for Effective Lawmaking featured the Congressional Bipartisanship Scores project, a dataset developed with Jacob M. Lollis that measures how members of Congress attract and offer cross-party support across time and policy areas.

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X Mention · June 15, 2026

Center for Effective Lawmaking shares Congressional Bipartisanship Scores on X

The Center for Effective Lawmaking shared the Congressional Bipartisanship Scores project on X, introducing the dataset co-developed with Jacob M. Lollis of the University of Cincinnati, supported and funded by the Portman Center.

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X Mention · June 15, 2026

Congressional Bipartisanship Scores shared on X

Jacob M. Lollis shared the Congressional Bipartisanship Scores dataset and accompanying biparty R package on X.

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X Mention · November 17, 2025

Rooney Democracy Institute highlights election-denying accountability research

The Rooney Democracy Institute featured the coauthored publication of The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections in the British Journal of Political Science, which finds that only January 6th participation led to meaningful consequences for state legislators.

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X Mention · October 9, 2025

Electing amateur politicians reduces cross-party collaboration shared on X

Rachel Porter shared the coauthored publication in PNAS on X, which finds that districts electing first-time members of the U.S. House experience substantial declines in bipartisan representation in the subsequent Congress.

Rachel Porter X post about PNAS amateurs paper

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Good Authority · August 22, 2025

The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections featured in Good Authority

John Sides featured this research in his Good Authority newsletter, discussing findings from this coauthored work. The piece highlighted how Republican state legislators who participated in the January 6th "Stop the Steal" rally faced lower vote share, fewer cosponsorships, and less party funding — while online statements and offline actions showed no such penalty — concluding that only the most extreme anti-election actions displayed any signs of consistent punishment.

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Center for Effective Lawmaking · July 21, 2025

The Bipartisan Path Revisited: Collaboration and Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. States

The Center for Effective Lawmaking featured this working paper extending Harbridge-Yong, Volden, and Wiseman's (2023) framework to state legislatures, finding that bipartisanship is positively associated with lawmaking success across 43 state legislatures, though substantial variation in institutional rules, party competition, and majority security shapes the contours of cross-party collaboration.

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X Mention · July 23, 2025

The Bipartisan Path Revisited shared on X

The Center for Effective Lawmaking featured Mackenzie R. Dobson's research on the conditional relationship between bipartisan collaboration and lawmaking success in state legislatures.

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Center for Effective Lawmaking · December 4, 2024

2024–2025 Small Grant Awards Announced

The Center for Effective Lawmaking named Mackenzie R. Dobson and Andrew Ballard among its 7th annual small grant award recipients for their project "State Legislative Bill Topics."

CEL X post announcing 2024-2025 small grant winners

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X Mention · December 12, 2024

UVA Batten School highlights 2024–2025 CEL small grant recipients on X

The UVA Batten School shared the Center for Effective Lawmaking's 2024–2025 small grant award recipients on X, congratulating the 10 scholars receiving grants for research into legislative effectiveness.

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Center for Effective Lawmaking · October 2024

Outcome-Consequential Campaigning

The Center for Effective Lawmaking featured a working paper with Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman that examines whether congressional campaigns offer insights into likely policy outcomes, finding that bipartisan campaigners go on to become more effective lawmakers in Congress.

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X Mention · October 21, 2024

Outcome-Consequential Campaigning shared on X

The Center for Effective Lawmaking shared a working paper, coauthored with Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman, on X. We find that bipartisan campaigners can become effective lawmakers in Congress.

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X Mention · August 30, 2024

Rachel Porter shares election-denying accountability preprint on X

Rachel Porter shared the coauthored preprint on X, which finds that U.S. state legislators were selectively held accountable for anti-election actions on and after January 6th.

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Junior Americanist Workshop Series (JAWS) · March 27, 2024

I'm Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers

Presented via video conference at the Junior Americanist Workshop Series Legislative Effectiveness panel, alongside Jacob M. Lollis, with Patrick Egan as discussant.

JAWS X post announcing the Legislative Effectiveness panel

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Center for Effective Lawmaking · 2023

I'm Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers

The Center for Effective Lawmaking featured work with Jacob M. Lollis on LGBTQ lawmakers, voter discrimination, and legislative effectiveness in the American states.

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A full curriculum vitae is available here.