One of the quiet questions a dean search committee carries into every file review is whether the candidate in front of them still thinks of themselves as a scholar. Administrative careers have a way of displacing research productivity — the committee work, the budget cycles, the personnel decisions, and the daily operational demands of leading a department crowd out the time and mental space that scholarship requires. Some candidates who have been chairs for a decade have essentially stopped producing. The record on this page is offered as evidence that I have not.
Three books are currently under contract. A peer-reviewed article on the Virginia Government Simulation was published in 2026. A nine-edition textbook remains in active revision. A multi-state database of state legislative primary election results covering 2022 and 2024 is in development. A book on misinformation and media literacy is under peer review. This is not the scholarship record of someone who used to be a researcher. It is the record of someone who has maintained a serious, active, collaborative scholarly identity across the full arc of an administrative career — because the two things reinforce each other rather than competing.
My scholarship has always been organized around a set of questions that connect the mechanics of democratic politics to the health of democratic participation: How do candidates get recruited for state legislative races? How does campaign finance shape the competitive landscape of state elections? How do citizens receive and process political information, and what happens when that information environment degrades? What does it mean for a democracy when its citizens lose the civic skills required to evaluate their government?
Those questions have produced work in several overlapping areas.
State legislative campaigns and elections. My earliest and most sustained research agenda centers on the operational reality of state legislative campaigns — the staffing, the fundraising, the technology use, and the competitive dynamics of races that receive almost no scholarly attention relative to their importance in American governance. This work has produced publications in Social Science Computer Review, multiple edited volume chapters, and conference presentations at APSA and MPSA, and continues in an ongoing multi-state database project tracking primary and general election results across 38 states since 2010. That database, which now covers both 2022 and 2024 election cycles, represents a longitudinal data resource that will support multiple future publications on candidate recruitment, primary competitiveness, and campaign finance trends.
Campaign finance in the states. Trained by graduate mentors with deep expertise in campaign money, I have pursued campaign finance as a parallel research thread throughout my career — presenting three times, publishing in peer-reviewed venues, and co-authoring work with Donald Gooch that traces the relationship between campaign finance laws and spending patterns across state legislative races.
Democratic participation and civic failure. The third strand of my research agenda addresses what happens at the citizen end of the democratic equation. My 2016 book Operator Error: Civic Failure and its Threat to American Democracy (Lexington Press) developed the argument that the core dysfunction in American democratic life is less a problem of political actors or broken institutions than a problem of civic capacity — citizens who have abandoned the active participation expected in a republic and replaced it with complaint and unrealistic expectation. That argument has proven durable and has shaped my civic engagement programming as well as my subsequent research.
Political communication and misinformation. Communicating Politics Online, now in its second edition from Palgrave (2023), traces how digital media has reshaped the relationship between political actors, journalists, and citizens. A book manuscript currently under peer review with Bloomsbury Press — Contemporary Debates: Misinformation and Disinformation — extends that work into the specific challenge of mis- and disinformation in the contemporary information environment, structured as a Q&A format accessible to general audiences as well as scholarly ones.
Primary elections and party organization. Primary Elections and American Politics: The Unintended Consequences of Progressive Era Reform (SUNY Press, 2022, co-authored with Joseph Romance) represents the fullest statement of my research on the structural consequences of how we nominate candidates — arguing that the progressive-era reforms that introduced direct primaries have produced institutional consequences that the reformers did not anticipate and would not have endorsed.
Three books are currently under contract and in active production:
The Last Negotiator: The Life and Leadership of Bob Dole (University Press of Kansas, expected 2026) is a legislative biography of Senator Bob Dole focused on his role as a bipartisan dealmaker, with TEFRA, the 1983 Social Security Amendments, and the Americans with Disabilities Act as the central legislative achievements. Research has included work in the Dole Archive Collections at the University of Kansas and oral history interviews with key figures from Dole's career. This book represents the intersection of my interest in legislative politics and my long-standing commitment to making political science accessible and relevant to general audiences.
The Rise and Fall of the Reagan Regime (Lexington Books, expected 2026, co-authored with Paul Rutledge and Joe Romance) traces the arc of Reagan-era conservatism as a governing coalition — its formation, its dominance, and its eventual fracture — situating the Reagan presidency within the broader trajectory of American political development.
American Government: Democracy's Enduring Challenge, Ninth Edition (Kendall Hunt, 2025) is the most recent revision of the textbook I have been developing since 2004. Nine editions across twenty-plus years of a textbook represents a sustained scholarly and pedagogical commitment that most academics never attempt. Each edition is not a cosmetic update but a substantive revision that responds to changes in the discipline, the political environment, and what students actually need from an introductory American government text.
The Boyer typology I have used throughout my career to organize my thinking about scholarship — discovery, pedagogy, integration, and application — remains a useful framework, but what it points toward is simpler than the framework itself: the conviction that scholarship at a regional comprehensive university should be rigorous, relevant, and connected to something beyond the production of publications for the academic record.
My scholarship of discovery — the state legislative data, the campaign finance work, the primary elections research — produces knowledge that matters for how we understand American democracy. My scholarship of pedagogy — the simulation publications, the technology-in-the-classroom research, the civic education assessment work — produces knowledge that improves how political science is taught. My scholarship of engagement — the co-authored work with students, the civic education program documentation, the public commentary — produces knowledge in dialogue with communities and practitioners rather than exclusively for academic audiences.
Maintaining all three threads simultaneously, across a career that has also included chairs of four departments, an interim deanship, a Faculty Senate presidency, and the full range of administrative obligations described elsewhere on this site, is not something every academic administrator can point to. It reflects a genuine integration of scholarly and administrative identity — not a trade-off between them — and it is the integration I would bring to any college I am privileged to lead.
I hope that my scholarly productivity signals something beyond the publications themselves. It signals intellectual engagement, disciplinary credibility with faculty, and the kind of sustained curiosity that makes a colleague who their fellow faculty want to talk to rather than someone whose decisions they merely comply with. The subpages below document the specific publications and provide links to representative works and external commentary on my scholarship.