Research

My long-term research examines two aspects of politics in the United States. First, for the last ten years I have focused on organizing and updating the municipal reform literature for American and urban politics. I argue that the U.S. is currently experiencing a new, modern era of municipal reform in which the primary goals of reformers are term limits on local legislators and voting restrictions.

My work on term limits began ten years ago in graduate school. Over time, I realized that the subject of term limits was an important lens through which to view the political reform tradition in America. Term limits are a quintessential example of the “quick fix” that institutional reformers promise for solving problems, and show political scientists how and why institutional reform may not always work out as originally intended. Further, term limits offer a historical timeline, going all the way back to Plato, through which to examine debates on democratic theory and institutional efficiency. In my upcoming book, Term Limits and the Modern Era of Municipal Reform, I expand on my term limits research through a comparative study of twenty case studies of movements for term limits throughout the U.S. The work is set to publish in mid-2024, available here:

Term Limits and the Modern Era of Municipal Reform. Routledge Publishing, 2024.

The rest of my time is dedicated to the study of water politics and law in the United States and the politics of water crises, notably lead pipe crises in the Midwest and Northeast, and the politics of water contestation in the American Southwest and Pacific.

My interest in water comes from several areas, but primarily it comes from my training as an urbanist. As I devoted more and more of my time to studying the politics of water crises in U.S. cities, such as Newark, Benton Harbor, Portland, Flint, and Jackson, I came to realize that water is an octopus. Its tentacles touch every facet of politics and law in the United States, and solving water problems is one of the few issues that most Americans can actually find common ground on. Water offers scholars an opportunity to realize new possibilities of thought and study, and to my own delight my students have come to love the subject in my classrooms.