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
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Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Research Affiliate, Center for Effective Lawmaking
Research Affiliate, Portman Center for Policy Solutions
research
published
under review
working paper
Selective Reciprocity in Bipartisan Collaboration: How Majority Security Shapes Legislative Success
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2026
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
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. We conclude that focusing sanctions on conspicuous acts against democratic institutions could leave less apparent—but still detrimental—efforts to undermine elections unchecked, ultimately weakening democratic health.
Electing Amateur Politicians Reduces Cross-Party Collaboration
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025
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. Compared to retaining incumbents and/or sending experienced freshmen to Congress, electing amateurs yields representatives who attract fewer opposing-party collaborators to their own bills and offer less support to the other party’s legislation. This pattern is concerning because cross-party coalitions remain critical for functional governance in the U.S. and beyond, even amidst party polarization. We therefore caution against the premise that political outsiders can readily fix political dysfunction.
I'm Coming Out! How Voter Discrimination Produces Effective LGBTQ Lawmakers
PS: Political Science & Politics, 2025
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.
Legislative Professionalism and Perceptions of White-Collar Government
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. Evidence from a preregistered conjoint experiment and observational analyses using the Cooperative Election Study (CES) 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.
Congressional Attention to Abortion After Dobbs: How Representational and Electoral Incentives Selectively Shape Issue Attention
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). We argue that, after Dobbs, abortion attention increased only when gender-linked representational considerations and party-based electoral incentives converged. These incentives aligned for female Democrats, but female Republicans faced electoral risks in foregrounding abortion, while male legislators faced weaker gender-linked representational incentives. 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. Pre-treatment trends show no systematic differences. After the leak, female Democrats increased abortion-related references relative to female Republicans, with no change among male legislators.
Bipartisan Campaigners Become Effective Lawmakers
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 candidate 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 congressional Representatives and find that candidates who exhibited bipartisan traits during those campaigns became more effective lawmakers than those not identified as bipartisan. This enhanced lawmaking effectiveness is especially pronounced in Representatives’ early terms in office and linked to the lawmaking stages requiring significant coalition building activities. These findings suggest that campaigns can offer voters meaningful insights, not only regarding the issues future Representatives attend to but also into their lawmaking effectiveness.
Bipartisanship Scores by Member and Issue Area in the U.S. Congress, 1983-2024
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. As a result, scholars are limited in answering key questions about whether bipartisanship is declining over time, who engages in it, which policy areas facilitate cross-party collaboration, and how such behavior shapes governing, representation, and democratic accountability. 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: 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 issue areas for 2,056 unique legislators and 11,549 legislator-term observations. 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
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. 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 show 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 women’s 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.
Building Effective Coalitions in the American States
Bipartisan collaboration is widely considered a reliable route to legislative success, largely based on evidence from the contemporary U.S. Congress — an institution marked by narrow and unstable majorities. 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. Understanding legislative effectiveness in these settings, therefore, requires moving beyond whether legislators build coalitions to the composition of those coalitions. I argue that bipartisan collaboration enhances effectiveness only when cross-party support is necessary to assemble a winning coalition. When majority control is insecure, bipartisan coalition-building predicts legislative success. When majority control is secure, however, cross-party support is no longer pivotal; effectiveness instead depends on assembling ideologically broad coalitions within the governing party. 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. In secure chambers, effective lawmakers are not cross-party bridge-builders but legislators who strategically manage intra-party ideological divisions — linking legislative success to partisan consolidation, sustaining polarization, and narrowing the representational breadth of governing coalitions.
Does Training Legislators Improve Policymaking?
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
Performative Bipartisanship: Symbolic Cross-Party Cooperation in an Era of Insecure Majorities
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A full curriculum vitae is available here.