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 and Congress and the Second Civil Rights Era, and they are under contract at the University of Chicago Press. The first book is done and was published in March 2021. More here.
A second project is an edited volume with Jared Rubin (Chapman University), which will be part of the Oxford Handbook series. The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy brings together scholars who work on essential and field-shaping topics in this burgeoning field. Historical Political Economy (HPE) is the study of how political and economic actors and institutions have interacted over time. It differs from much of economic history in that it focuses on the causes and consequences of politics. It departs from much of conventional political economy in that its context is strictly historical, even if/when it has implications for contemporary political economy. It also departs from much of history in its use of social-scientific theory and methods. Thus, while HPE involves elements of the traditional fields of economics, political economy, and history, it is separate from – and integrative of – them. Handbook authors will be drawn from a variety of fields – political science, economics, sociology, history, law, and public policy – who all work on similar subjects but rarely talk to one another. Top HPE scholars are known in their respective fields and often publish in their field’s best journals, yet their work has limited impact across disciplines. While this is increasingly the case across the social sciences, it is an especially important issue in HPE, which is inherently more inter-disciplinary than most other fields of economics, political science, and sociology. As such, the Handbook’s goal is to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries and generate true cross-disciplinary dialogues. The volume will publish in early 2023. The working TOC is here.
A third 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 fourth 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 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.