Recent political events have prompted an examination of the analytical tools and conceptual frameworks used in political science to understand voting and candidate choice. Scholars in the behavioral tradition have highlighted the empirical relationship between racial resentment and anti-black affect among white voters during and after President Obama’s successful run for re-election. The theoretical role of white identity within the context of the privileged status of this racial group has seen much less scholarly attention by political scientists, particularly with respect to racial group identification and its implications. To address this lacuna, we argue that racial identification among white voters can be conceived of as a utility-based trait relevant to candidate choice, combining a social-psychological approach of group membership together with a rational choice perspective. This conceptualization of the political utility of white racial identity provides wider conceptual latitude for empirical tests and explanations of voting in U.S. elections.

An extensive literature in political science focuses on government expenditures. In my dissertation, however, I focus on taxation, because governments must tax their citizens in order to engage in any of the choices about distributing that revenue. Each empirical chapter in this dissertation examines a different aspect of tax policy. In "Trading Policy" I argue that political parties have been central to trade policy in the United States, which runs contrary to the dominant demand-side explanations for trade policy. The research design I use allows me to account for a variety of different constituent factors that could influence voting, and then determine if party has any effect beyond constituent interests. The results suggest that party plays a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy once we account for constituency effects. In "Tax Man Cometh" (co-authored with Lissa Ziegler) we examine how a state's choice of tax policy reveals information about state capabilities. In particular, we focus on establishing the validity of a new construct for state capacity - income taxation. We argue that to measure a state's relative level of capacity we should look at the ratio of income taxes to total taxes collected by the state. We demonstrate that this is a valid measure for our construct of state capacity. In "Diffusion of State Tax and Expenditure Limits" Ellen Moule and I focus how state tax and expenditure limits (TELs) diffuse across the U.S. states. First, we argue that to understand policy diffusion requires paying attention to policy proposals as well as policy adoptions. Second, we separately model the determinants of exposure to a policy and then, conditional on exposure, the determinants of policy adoption. We find that proposal of a tax and expenditure limit is significantly related to whether states with similar income levels have previously adopted a TEL. Taken together these chapters help us to understand the determinants of tax policy and also what we can infer about a particular country based on its choices of tax policy

The study of causal mechanisms interests scholars across the social sciences. Case studies can be a valuable tool in developing knowledge and hypotheses about how causal mechanisms function. The usefulness of case studies in the search for causal mechanisms depends on effective case selection, and there are few existing guidelines for selecting cases to study causal mechanisms. We outline a general approach for selecting cases for pathway analysis: a mode of qualitative research that is part of a mixed-method research agenda, which seeks to (1) understand the mechanisms or links underlying an association between some explanatory variable, X1, and an outcome, Y, in particular cases and (2) generate insights from these cases about mechanisms in the unstudied population of cases featuring the X1/ Y relationship. The gist of our approach is that researchers should choose cases for comparison in light of two criteria. The first criterion is the expected relationship between X1/ Y, which is the degree to which cases are expected to feature the relationship of interest between X1 and Y. The second criterion is variation in case characteristics or the extent to which the cases are likely to feature differences in characteristics that can facilitate hypothesis generation. We demonstrate how to apply our approach and compare it to a leading example of pathway analysis in the so-called resource curse literature, a prominent example of a correlation featuring a nonlinear relationship and multiple causal mechanisms.

AbstractState capacity is a key concept for research in public policy and political science. Despite its importance, there is no broadly accepted measure of state capacity in the existing literature, and frequently used measures of capacity have not been examined for their validity. We begin with an explicit definition of state capacity – the state's ability to implement public policy – and connect this definition to a measurable outcome of state capacity – the state's taxation of income. We show that this measure, income taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue, is a useful indicator of state capacity and meets higher standards of measurement validity than other tax-based indicators. We also compare our measure to the most common existing indicators of state capacity to show that income taxation is a better theoretical and statistical measure of states’ effectiveness in policy implementation.