Welcome! I am a Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. I am also a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers.
My research interests include American political economy and American political development, with a focus on labor politics and policy, organizing and collective action, parties and groups, the presidency, and multi-method research. With my colleagues at the Workplace Justice Lab, I study wage theft and work with worker organizations and labor standards enforcement agencies to create more equitable and effective policy enforcement.
My new book, Alt-Labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights (2024), examines the changing nature of workers’ rights over the last half-century and the political development of alt-labor groups (nonunion, nonprofit forms of worker organization), which are supporting and organizing predominantly low-wage immigrant workers and workers of color in their fight for their rights in the political and economic arenas.
I am currently working on a multi-year study titled Unequal Protections: Regional Disparities in Labor Standards Policies, Enforcement, and Violations, supported by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, in which my coauthors and I are examining the relationship between region, race, state enforcement capacities, and minimum wage violations in the United States.
Other research on wage theft can be found in my article “Deterring Wage Theft” and coauthored scholarly work here, here, and here. A list of my policy reports on wage theft can be found here.
I am also the author of Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush (Princeton University Press), co-editor of Rethinking Political Institutions: the Art of the State (NYU Press), and have published numerous journal articles and book chapters on APD, the presidency, political parties, institutional change, and qualitative and multi-method research. Links to these works can be found on my research page here.
I teach a variety of courses on American government and politics. My teaching was kindly recognized with the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching (highest teaching award, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences) and the R. Barry Farrell Teaching Award (Department of Political Science), and I was twice elected by the Northwestern student body to the Faculty Honor Roll.
I am currently chair of the Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy program at the Institute of Policy Research and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Political Science department. I am also affiliated with the Comparative-Historical Social Science program and the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern.
Other details are available on my CV or by contacting me!