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American Politics

AMERICAN POLITICS is the study of the political system of the United States, including the people, groups, ideas, and institutions that make up that system. Students and scholars may focus on political behavior (voting, public opinion), or on political institutions (Congress, parties, interest groups), or on the relationships between institutions and behavior. Many scholars focus on contemporary politics but some study the evolution of political processes and institutions over time.

  • The American Politics field at UMass has become a leader in the discipline over the past decade thanks to the department’s ability to hire and retain world-class award-winning scholars. The faculty conduct numerous active research programs and offer a broad array of training in the field of American Politics. Yet, while the American Politics field is the largest in the department, it is also a tightknit community that supports active research groups and provides plentiful opportunities for collaborative research. Indeed, every recent PhD student in American Politics has co-authored publications with faculty in the field.
  • The field has excelled in both academic and non-academic job placement in recent years. Recent students have gone on to tenure-track jobs at institutions such as Brandeis University, Dartmouth College, Fordham University, and Stevens Institute of Technology. Others have used their training in social science methods and critical thinking to find rewarding employment in the corporate and non-profit sectors.
  • Some recent PhD students in our program have chosen to capitalize on our strengths in Political Psychology to focus their research on questions of public opinion and mass behavior. These students also benefit from the presence of additional political psychology scholars with strong international reputations who are based in the psychology department here at UMass, and who study American political behavior on its own and in comparative context. Other recent PhD students have taken advantage of our faculty’s expertise in American Political Development to examine the evolution of presidential rhetoric and the development of American political parties as extended networks of activists and interest groups.
  • Still other recent American Politics PhD students have taken advantage of the Computational Social Science Initiative to develop extended training in advanced methodologies for analyzing big data, social networks, and text-as-data. We anticipate expanded opportunities in this area as early as next year through the new certificate program in Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS).
  • Students interested in US Judicial Politics benefit from strong ties to award-winning Public Law faculty at UMass-Amherst.
  • Finally, the UMass American Politics field offers numerous opportunities for involvement in survey research. The department is home to the UMass Poll, which conducts cutting edge online polling to provide accurate, innovative, and timely data on public opinion of citizens of Massachusetts, New England, and the nation. The field also organizes a cross-field module in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the largest biannual political survey of the American public. This gives American Politics students the opportunity to obtain sophisticated training and practical experience in survey research methods. They also can often field survey questions for their own research projects on representative national surveys at no cost, and present their findings at a range of venues from informal workshops of UMass students and faculty to the biennial CCES Sundance Conference.

SUBFIELD STRENGTHS: American Politics faculty at UMass have national and international reputations in a range of topics central to understanding the political system of the United States.

  • American Political Development and Political Institutions
  • Political Psychology, Public Opinion, and Political Communication
  • Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Politics
  • Parties, Elections, and Campaign Finance

CROSS-FIELD STREAMS: In addition to the strengths in the American Politics subfields, our research and teaching centers around several cross-cutting themes that connect these subfields both to one another and to faculty in other fields.

  • US and Comparative Judicial Politics. Americanists at UMass work closely with Public Law faculty interested in US Judicial and Legal Institutions. US Judicial Scholars from Public Law participate actively in the American Politics working group and work closely with PhD students in American politics; and they work with PhD students and Comparative scholars to compare US institutions to those elsewhere in the world.
  • Immigration & Refugees. Americanists’ work on public opinion, media coverage and immigration policy in Europe connects to scholars in Public Law and International Relations working on immigration and refugee issues, as a component of the domestic and global response to human security crises.
  • US, Comparative and Global Social Policy. Americanists work on US and comparative social policy connects them to scholars in Public Policy and Organizations and International Relations. Faculty in this cluster study US education policy, health policy in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, gender, race and family policy in the US, science and technology policy and global human security policy.
  • Computational Social Science. Methodological rigor is prized at UMass, and American Politics scholars at UMass been particularly involved in the UMass Computational Social Science Research Cluster, which ties them to scholars in Public Policy and International Relations – as well as to other scholars across the university in statistics, economics, sociology and computer science.
  • History & Politics. Big data can inform some questions, but an appreciation of history, archival research and process-tracing can inform others. American Politics scholars use historical methods to study education policy; Public Policy faculty use them to study sports policy; Comparative Politics faculty use them to study US and European electoral institutions; and Political Theorists use them to study democracy, decolonization and US nation-building.

SOME RECENT STUDENT-FACULTY AND STUDENT-STUDENT PUBLICATIONS:

Albert, Zachary, and David J. Barney. “The Party Reacts: The Strategic Nature of Endorsements of Donald Trump.” American Politics Research 47, no. 6 (2019): 1239–1258.

Albert, Zachary, Bruce A. Desmarais, and Raymond J. La Raja. Donor Networks and Their Influence in Congressional Primaries 1980–2014, 2015.

Albert, Zachary, and Raymond J. La Raja. “Political Parties and Policy Analysis.” Policy Analysis in the United States 12 (2018): 205.

Albert, Zachary and Raymond J. La Raja. 2017. “Campaign Spending” in Sage Handbook of Electoral Behavior, eds. Kai Arzheimer, Jocelyn Evans and Michael LewisBeck (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage).

Costa, Mia, Jill S. Greenlee, Tatishe Nteta, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Elizabeth A. Sharrow. “Family Ties? The Limits of Fathering Daughters on Congressional Behavior.” American Politics Research 47, no. 3 (2019): 471–493.

Costa, Mia, Kaylee T. Johnson, and Brian F. Schaffner. “Rethinking Representation from a Communal Perspective.” Political Behavior 40, no. 2 (2018): 301–320.

Desmarais, Bruce A., Raymond J. La Raja, and Michael S. Kowal. “The Fates of Challengers in U.S. House Elections: The Role of Extended Party Networks in Supporting Candidates and Shaping Electoral Outcomes.” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 1 (2015): 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12106.

Gross, Justin H., and Kaylee T. Johnson. “Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump.” PS: Political Science & Politics 49, no. 4 (2016): 748–754.

Nteta, Tatishe M., Rebecca Lisi, and Melinda R. Tarsi. “Rendering the Implicit Explicit: Political Advertisements, Partisan Cues, Race, and White Public Opinion in the 2012 Presidential Election.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 4, no. 1 (2016): 1–29.

Rhodes, Jesse H., and Zachary Albert. “The Transformation of Partisan Rhetoric in American Presidential Campaigns, 1952–2012.” Party Politics 23, no. 5 (2017): 566–577.

Rhodes, Jesse H., and Kaylee T. Johnson. “Welcoming Their Hatred: Class Populism in Democratic Rhetoric in American Presidential Campaigns, 1932–2012.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2017): 92–121.

Rolfe, Meredith, and Stephanie Chan. "Voting and Political Participation." The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks (2017): 357-382.

Schaffner, Brian F., Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta. "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism." Political Science Quarterly 133, no. 1 (2018): 9-34.