The E. E. Schattschneider Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government.
Rachel Porter is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow with the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022. Her research, which examines how electoral institutions influence strategic campaign position taking and congressional policymaking, employs an original set of text data collected from over 5,000 congressional candidates’ campaign websites. Rachel has published articles in the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Political Research Quarterly. She is currently working on a co-authored book manuscript that investigates the growing success of political amateurs at winning seats in Congress.
Citation from the Award Committee:
In “Some Politics Are Still Local: Strategic Position Taking in Congress & Elections,” Dr. Porter explores the kinds of electoral conditions under which congressional candidates might still choose to “go local.” She employs text data on policy positions extracted from campaign websites for candidates who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives across the 2018 and 2020 elections. Pairing this original data collection with a variety of methods for quantitative text analysis, Dr. Porter shows that theories of strategic candidate behavior must be updated to better reflect what locally oriented campaigning looks like in today’s era of nationalized politics. More specifically, she finds that candidates are likely to adopt local issues into their campaign platforms when there is strong two-party competition in their election. Pleasing moderate and undecided voters is paramount in marginal districts, and these kinds of voters tend to prefer candidates who place local priorities ahead of party messaging. Additionally, Dr. Porter shows that candidates who have a history of legislating on local issues (i.e., members of Congress and state legislators) dedicate a statistically significantly greater proportion of their campaign platform to local topics. Finally, she demonstrates that candidates are less likely to run on local issues when their primary electorate skews ideologically extreme.
Additionally, Dr. Porter shows that politicians who employ locally-oriented rhetoric in their campaigns carry forward this same position taking behavior into the legislative arena. This finding underscores a critical, but under-emphasized, continuity between an incumbent’s electoral and legislative behavior. This dissertation refocuses the discipline’s attention in an era of nationalized expectations back towards local considerations, reminding scholars that local politics are still relevant in modern campaigns. We would like to commend Dr. Porter for the exceedingly high quality of her dissertation research.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Pamela C. Corley (chair) of Southern Methodist University, Dr. Davia C. Downey of the University of Memphis, and Dr. Daniel J. Hopkins of the University of Pennsylvania.
