Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I am also a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for Effective Lawmaking and a Research Affiliate with the Portman Center for Policy Solutions.

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, the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 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.

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Publications

Legislative Professionalism and Perceptions of White-Collar Government
Mackenzie R. Dobson, Jacob M. Lollis, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Justin H. Kirkland
Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2026

Abstract

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, the authors argue that opposition to professionalism stems, in part, from a belief that white-collar legislators may not represent society's interests broadly. Evidence from a preregistered conjoint experiment and observational analyses using the Cooperative Election Study supports this claim. Respondents associate professionalism with a legislature primarily composed of white-collar lawmakers, whom they do not believe govern to benefit the general public. These findings suggest that opposition to legislative professionalism likely reflects a rejection of white-collar government rather than repudiation of the institutional gains from professionalization.

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Selective Reciprocity in Bipartisan Collaboration: How Majority Security Shapes Legislative Success
Mackenzie R. Dobson
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2026

Abstract

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.

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The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections
Rachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, Emily Anderson, Géssica de Freitas, Mackenzie R. Dobson, Abigail Hemmen, and Emma Schroeder
British Journal of Political Science, 2025

Abstract

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.

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Electing Amateur Politicians Reduces Cross-Party Collaboration
Rachel Porter, Jeffrey J. Harden, and Mackenzie R. Dobson
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025

Abstract

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. Our results suggest that amateurs are unlikely to deliver on their promise for pragmatic governance, as they resist or undervalue the compromises essential to lawmaking.

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I’m Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers
Jacob M. Lollis and Mackenzie R. Dobson
PS: Political Science & Politics, 2025

Abstract

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. To link our findings to voter discrimination, we leverage over-time variation in discrimination toward LGBTQ individuals. Across four tests, we consistently find that LGBTQ lawmakers elected in high-discrimination environments are more effective than those elected from less discriminatory environments.

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Working Papers

Congressional Bipartisanship Scores by Member and Issue Area, 1983–2024
Mackenzie R. Dobson and Jacob M. Lollis

Status: Revise and Resubmit, Nature: Scientific Data
Last Update: June 2026

Abstract

Although bipartisanship is central to the study of legislative behavior and often necessary for policymaking success, scholars lack a centralized, publicly accessible, and consistently updated dataset measuring legislators' propensity to offer and attract cross-party support over time and across issue areas. As a result, researchers often construct different measures of bipartisanship, making it harder for scholars to build on existing work and engage in cumulative conversations about whether bipartisanship is declining, who engages in it, and which issues facilitate cross-party collaboration. We introduce a dataset of Congressional Bipartisanship Scores (CBS) 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 member-term measures: attracting original out-party cosponsors to one's own bills and offering original cosponsorship to out-party-sponsored bills. The dataset includes aggregate and issue-specific scores across 34 policy areas for 2,056 legislators and 11,549 legislator-term observations. To facilitate broad reuse, we make the data publicly available through Harvard Dataverse and the R package biparty.

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Congressional Attention to Abortion after Dobbs: A Theory of Representational and Party Incentive Alignment
Jacob M. Lollis and Mackenzie R. Dobson

Status: Under Review
Last Update: June 2026
Conference Presentations: SPSA 2026; MPSA 2026

Abstract

Landmark Supreme Court rulings can reshape policy, rights, and public opinion, but their effects on congressional issue attention remain less clear. We develop an incentive-alignment theory of congressional issue attention, arguing that judicial decisions linked to identity-salient issues reshape attention selectively when legislators' gender-linked and party incentives align. We test this argument using Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). After Dobbs, Democratic female legislators faced reinforcing incentives: abortion was both gender-salient and electorally advantageous for Democrats to foreground. Republican female legislators faced cross-cutting incentives: abortion remained gender-salient but became electorally risky for Republicans. Treating the leaked draft opinion as the shock date, we estimate differential within-legislator changes in abortion attention across party and gender using nearly 1.6 million legislator statements from U.S. House committee hearings. Pre-leak trends show no systematic differences across groups. After the leak, Democratic female legislators increased abortion-related references relative to Republican female legislators; pooled triple-interaction models further show that this party-based increase was significantly larger among female legislators than among male legislators.

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Bipartisan Campaigners Become Effective Lawmakers
Mackenzie R. Dobson, Craig Volden, and Alan E. Wiseman

Status: Under Review
Last Update: August 2026
Conference Presentations: MPSA 2023

Abstract

Strong evidence exists that effective lawmakers in one legislative term tend to be effective lawmakers in subsequent terms. But can voters glean insights into the likely lawmaking effectiveness of candidates even before they hold office? Might campaigns reveal characteristics of future effective lawmakers? To address these questions, we take advantage of new scholarship highlighting the enhanced lawmaking effectiveness of bipartisan legislators (Harbridge-Yong et al. 2023). We examine the initial campaigns of more than 800 Representatives in the U.S. Congress, finding that candidates who exhibited bipartisan traits during those campaigns became more effective lawmakers than those legislators who were not identified as bipartisan in their first campaigns. This enhanced lawmaking effectiveness is especially pronounced in Representatives' early terms and is linked to lawmaking stages requiring significant coalition-building activities. These findings suggest that legislators engage with the lawmaking process in ways that correlate with their expressed commitment to bipartisanship when they first ran for office.

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Policy Agendas, Effective Lawmaking, and Women’s Issues in State Legislatures
Andrew M. O. Ballard, Mackenzie R. Dobson, Martín Gandur, Craig Volden, and Alan E. Wiseman

CEL Working Paper Series</span> Status: Under Review
Last Update: July 2026
Conference Presentations: APSA 2025; CEL 2026; SPPC 2026

Abstract

We leverage transformer-based text classification to accurately assign more than 1.6 million bills that were introduced into state legislatures to 18 different policy areas. We then introduce Issue-Specific State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (ISLES), for legislatures that convened between 2009-2019 in 48 states. We show which issues gain the most attention in legislatures, and which are the most gridlocked, as well as systematic patterns in the issues over which experts or ideological centrists are most successful. We also demonstrate that female lawmakers disproportionately sponsor bills engaging with Civil Rights, Education, Health, and Welfare: policy areas that are conventionally categorized as being "women's issues." We find that bills in these issue areas are more gridlocked than other policy areas, on average. However, in chambers approaching gender parity, women's issue bills—especially those proposed by women—are more likely to advance into law.

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Risky Business: The Strategic Timing of Bipartisanship in Congress
Mackenzie R. Dobson and Jacob M. Lollis

Status: In preparation for submission
Last Update: September 2026
Conference Presentations: APSA 2026

Abstract

Why has bipartisanship persisted in Congress despite rising partisan polarization? Existing approaches largely treat bipartisanship as a question of whether legislators cooperate across party lines, overlooking a consequential dimension of that cooperation: when it occurs. We argue that legislators strategically time cross party support to manage the competing costs and benefits of bipartisan participation. Original out-party cosponsors join legislation at introduction, often help develop the bill, and are among the first members of the opposing party to cross the aisle. In doing so, they bear the greatest political risks of bipartisan participation. Other legislators can reduce those risks by waiting until coalition growth provides political cover and legislative developments signal greater viability, while still claiming bipartisan credit for eventually joining. We call this behavior strategically delayed bipartisanship. Drawing on elite interviews with members of Congress and their staff and more than 2.4 million cosponsorship decisions across 147,669 House and Senate bills from 1983 to 2024, we develop a new measure that distinguishes strategically delayed from original bipartisan participation. Strategic delay is most common when the partisan costs of crossing the aisle are highest: among minority-party members, in the House, and on more partisan issues. It is also more common among electorally vulnerable and ideologically moderate legislators, for whom a bipartisan reputation should be electorally valuable. Among vulnerable legislators, strategic delay is associated with stronger subsequent electoral performance. However, legislators who engage in more strategically delayed bipartisanship subsequently attract fewer original out-party cosponsors for their own bills and exhibit lower legislative effectiveness. Therefore, we reconceptualize bipartisanship as a dynamic, strategic choice about when legislators cross party lines, showing how legislators can capture the electoral rewards of bipartisanship while avoiding many of the political risks of leading bipartisan cooperation.

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Does Training Legislators Improve Policymaking?
Mackenzie R. Dobson, Emma Schroeder, Daniel M. Butler, James M. Curry, Thad Kousser, and Jeffrey J. Harden

Status: In preparation for submission
Last Update: June 2026
Conference Presentations: MPSA 2026; SPPC 2026

Abstract

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. 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.

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Data & Software

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.

Additional projects will be listed here as they are released.