A first project, co-authored with Justin Peck (Wesleyan University), examines how the issue of civil rights for black Americans has been dealt with in the U.S. Congress from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 through the present day. The book will take a historical approach and detail how the U.S. Congress has struggled with civil rights issues across different eras in the Nations history: from Reconstruction through Redemption, when blacks were first empowered and then reduced to second-class citizens; across the bleak period of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when Congress was almost wholly unreceptive to black Americans plight and civil rights policy reached a post-1863 low point; through different phases of the post-World War I era, when blacks made slow and steady progress in generating a civil rights agenda in Congress, culminating in the landmark Acts of 1964 and 1965 (and their subsequent Extensions and Amendments). The project is divided into two books: Congress and the First Civil Rights Era , which was published by University of Chicago Press in 2021, and Congress and the Second Civil Rights Era, which is under contract at the University of Chicago Press.
A second project, co-authored with Thomas R. Gray (University of Texas at Dallas), examines voter disenfranchisement in the United States. The book provides a general history of disenfranchisement, including the antebellum era when alien voting laws and felon voting laws were first adopted, before focusing on the period from 1870 (when all ex-Confederate states were back in the Union) to 1970 (when literacy tests, the last of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchising provisions, were finally eliminated). The book looks not just at the eleven Southern states, but at all 50 states over that timespan. This is important, as some disenfranchising laws – like literacy tests and ex-felon voting prohibitions – extended beyond the South. In sum, we compile a dataset of statewide executive elections – presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial (after the adoption of direct election) – in all 50 states over 101 years, which allows us to capture the full range of disenfranchising provisions and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis (thus tracking when key laws turned “on” or “off”) to provide the first systematic study of the “disenfranchisement era” in U.S. elections. The book is entitled Voter Disenfranchisement in the United States: A Political-Economic History, and it is under contract at Oxford University Press. The working TOC is here.
A third project, co-authored with Nicholas Napolio (University of California, Riverside) deals with the subject of party effects and the American Civil War, which is an extension of some of my early articles-based research. The book is entitled Political Parties, Congressional Politics, and the American Civil War. It tackles the question that has vexed the Congress literature over the last decade and a half: do parties matter in the internal politics of Congress? We argue that Civil War politics provides a perfect natural experiment to test for party effects, because the Confederacy was nearly identical to the United States in all institutional facets, except that a strong two-party system flourished in the U.S. while a party system did not exist in the Confederacy. Thus, the effects of party on congressional decision making can be isolated and assessed. In addition to revisiting some of my earlier work on the subject, we will conduct a new set of analyses and develop some comprehensive case studies. Here is a general outline of the chapters. The working TOC is here.
A fourth project will convert a special issue of Public Choice into an edited volume on Springer. I will write a new introduction, and the volume will have a new concluding section entitled “Views from Historical Political Economy,” with chapters written by Alexandra Cirone, Aditya Dasgupta, and David Stasavage.
A fifth and final project is a book in the New Institutionalism in American Politics series, on W. W. Norton Press, edited by Kenneth A. Shepsle. The book is entitled Analyzing Parties, which will stand alongside other books in the series like Analyzing Congress (by Charles Stewart of MIT), Analyzing Policy (by Michael Munger of Duke University), Analyzing Interest Groups (by Scott Ainsworth of the University of Georgia), and Analyzing Elections (by Rebecca Morton of NYU). Here is a general outline of the chapters.