Published Works

Gervais, Bryan, Connor Dye, Gabriel Acevedo, Christopher Ellison, Margaret Kelly. “Do Authoritarians Support Political Violence?” PS: Political Science & Politics.

Gervais, Bryan, Connor Dye, and Amebr Chin. 2025. “Incivility or Invalidity? Evaluating Perspective API Scores as a Measure of Political Incivility.” American Politics Research 53(3): 266-274.

“Bounded Rationality and Public Administration.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (with JoBeth Shafran and Bryan Jones)

Working Papers

“The Erosion of Specialization: How Institutional Evolution Undermines Congressional Oversight” Under review

Congress’s decentralized committee system expands oversight capacity but creates coordination problems. I argue that the incentives behind coordination challenges evolve as the committee system responds to emerging problems. Initially, informal domain specific expertise accumulated through legislating mitigates coordination challenges by lowering oversight costs in familiar areas. As boundary-spanning issues emerge, committees' legislative jurisdictions converge, eroding expertise differentials and increasing duplicative oversight. To capture jurisdictional evolution, I introduce a novel computational approach using transformer-based embeddings of House bill summaries and cosine similarity to track both within-committee jurisdiction change and cross-committee convergence. I find that committees with larger jurisdictional shifts subsequently oversee more novel agencies, while committee pairs with greater prior convergence show higher probabilities of duplicating oversight on identical agency-subtopic combinations. These findings suggest that effective oversight design must account for how coordination mechanisms deteriorate as policy environments evolve.

“Overcoming Information Overload: The Policy Consequences of Committee Fragmentation” Under review

Congress delegates responsibility over monitoring any given problem to a specific set of agencies in the bureaucracy, raising concerns of tunnel vision characterized by the same set of actions monopolizing discussion of an issue. This paper examines how the committee system is structured to help Congress overcome these informational pitfalls of policy subsystems. I argue that the committee system produces a richer information environment by creating incentives for each committee to examine issues through different agency programs. To test my argument, I build an original dataset of over 640,000 witnesses that testified at every congressional hearing from 1973 to 2015. I provide evidence that committees prioritize the agencies they interact with during the legislative process. I demonstrate the wider utility of considering the different search dynamics of each committee by showing that more committees examining a problem result in a more diverse set of agencies providing information on the problem.

“Academic Utilization in Congress: Issue Novelty and the Segmentation of Expert Information” Under review

Academic research is often criticized as being slower, more abstract, and less responsive compared to other expert organizations like think tanks, government agencies, and advocacy groups. Yet, academics regularly influence policy debates and shape legislative agendas. Given academia's apparent disadvantages in competitive information markets, why do policymakers continue to rely on academic expertise? This paper argues that organizational incentives create systematic segmentation in information markets, with different expert types specializing in distinct problem areas. Academia's incentives for exploratory research enable scholars to analyze novel policy problems that market-responsive organizations systematically avoid, leaving academics as the primary source of expertise when policymakers confront unfamiliar issues. I test this theory by analyzing expert witness selection in U.S. congressional hearings, where committees choose among competing sources to meet their information needs. Using word embeddings of hearing summaries to measure how conceptually distant each hearing topic is from a committee's historical agenda, I find that issue novelty significantly increases academic witness participation while decreasing think tank and government agency participation. These results reveal how information market segmentation determines which experts inform policy debates on emerging issues.

Works in Progress

“Information Processing and Congressional Reform” (with Sean Theriault)

This paper reevaluates the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. While the Act’s contemporaries may have been underwhelmed, we show that the jurisdictional changes it mandated had a significant consequence on congressional attention. At a broad level, the committee system operated differently after the Act’s passage. A more fine-grained analysis shows even more compelling evidence. Committees that experienced jurisdictional changes had relatively more hearings; furthermore, issues that underwent change were the subject of more congressional attention.

“Constrained Campaigns: How Alliances Reduce Party Attention to Defense Issues” (with Kevin Galambos)

How do international commitments influence domestic political party competition? While scholars have extensively examined how international affairs affect domestic politics through leaders and elites, the effect of international commitments on political party dynamics remain underexplored. In this article, we argue that alliance commitments constrain parties' abilities to credibly differentiate themselves on defense issues by creating domestic and international audience costs for deviating from supporting security partners. Given these constraints, parties reduce their emphasis on defense issues and exhibit less variation in their foreign policy positions. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project covering 41 countries between 1991 and 2023, this study shows that NATO and Partnership for Peace membership is associated with decreased emphasis on defense issues during election campaigns. Subsequent results demonstrate that this lack of attention is driven by convergence, as parties in member countries exhibit significantly less variation in defense positions compared to non-member countries.

“Geographic Framing and Immigration Attitudes: How Local Versus National Perspectives Shape Public Opinion” (with Megan Dias)

Public preferences toward immigration policy are shaped not only by perceptions of immigrants but also by the geographic scale at which immigration is considered. While prior research emphasizes economic and cultural threat as drivers of immigration attitudes, we argue that geographic framing shapes public opinion by altering how people psychologically process immigration-related information. Drawing on construal level theory, local frames prompt concrete thinking about specific immigrants in one's community, activating inclusive community identities and more favorable attitudes. In contrast, national frames promote abstract thinking about immigration as a phenomenon, activating exclusive national identities and less favorable attitudes. To test this theory, we plan to field a nationally representative survey experiment in which respondents are randomly assigned to receive either a local, national, or neutral immigration frame. We then plan to measure attitudes toward both local immigrant integration policies and national-level enforcement policies. We will further examine whether local immigrant concentration moderates the effect of geographic framing, by linking survey respondents to local demographic data..

“Ballot Initiatives, Question Wording, and Voter Intent: Assessing Voter Understanding of Ballot Propositions during the 2024 Election “ (with Bryan Gervais, Elias Hudson, Camilo Nieto-Matiz, and Walter Wilson)

While democratic theory has espoused the virtues of ballot measures, political scientists have questioned whether ballot propositions empower voters or organized, established interests. We contribute to this debate by considering how voters support for several propositions significantly changed, depending on whether they were presented with common descriptions of the measures featured in local news media or the actual, vague ballot wording. Our study demonstrates that the language used to present ballot initiatives can profoundly shape public support. While simplified descriptions drawn from local media coverage initially elicited low levels of support in an initial survey, the actual ballot language featured in a second survey—despite its more technical and legalistic phrasing—produced significantly higher approval. In a third study, featuring respondents from the first two surveys, we employed an experimental design, which leveraged both between-subject and within-subject comparisons across waves, The results confirmed the robustness of this effect: participants frequently changed their positions depending on whether they encountered a plain-language summary or the official ballot text. These shifts were not random but systematically driven by the form of wording.

“Party Identification and the Subjective and Objective Economic Vote” (with Christopher Wlezien, Mark Kayser, Bailey Via, and Jan Zilinsky)

Numerous studies have demonstrated a weakening identification of voters with political parties in Western Europe over the last 40 years.  Previous research shows that this has led to increased economic voting, where less partisan voters place greater weight on (objective) macroeconomic conditions. Building on research demonstrating that individual-level economic perceptions are in part endogenous to party preference, we argue the degree to which economic perceptions are brought in line with vote choice also depends on partisan attachment. Specifically, we expect that trends in partisanship produce contrasting tendencies in the effects of the objective and subjective economy on the economic vote: low attachment reduces the subjective economic vote while increasing the extent to which objective economic conditions are considered in the voting calculus. The model not only accounts for trends in Europe, where partisanship has declined, but it also helps explain voter behavior in places where identification with parties has increased.