Published
Selective Reciprocity in Bipartisan Collaboration: How Majority Security Shapes Legislative Success
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2026
Mackenzie R. Dobson
Best Paper on State Politics, 2025
Best Poster, State Politics and Policy Conference, 2024
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.
The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections
British Journal of Political Science, 2025
Rachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, Emily Anderson, Géssica de Frietas, Mackenzie R. Dobson, Abigail Hemmen, and Emma Schroeder
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 selective—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.
Electing Amateur Politicians Reduces Cross-Party Collaboration
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025
Rachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Mackenzie R. Dobson
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 intensifies partisan divisions rather than alleviates them.
I'm Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers
PS: Political Science & Politics, 2025
Jacob M. Lollis and Mackenzie R. Dobson
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
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
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
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
Bipartisanship Scores by Member and Issue Area in the U.S. Congress, 1983–2024
Mackenzie R. Dobson and Jacob M. Lollis
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.'
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
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
