Mackenzie R. Dobson

Hello! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Government at the University of Virginia and a Visiting Scholar in the Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I am also a Graduate Affiliate with the Center for Effective Lawmaking and a Research Affiliate with the Portman Center for Policy Solutions.

I am on the 2025–2026 academic job market.

My published and forthcoming work appears in the British Journal of Political Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

I study American political institutions with a focus on legislatures, representation, and effective lawmaking. My research advances two interconnected lines of inquiry: first, I investigate how parties, legislative rules, and institutional capacity structure opportunities for bipartisan collaboration and effective lawmaking in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures; second, I examine how voters and the media evaluate legislators’ behavior and identities in ways that shape representation and accountability. I am a quantitative social scientist who specializes in quantitative methods and regularly employs big data, machine learning, causal inference, social network analysis, and other computational approaches in my research.

My dissertation, Asymmetric Bipartisanship: Conditional Cooperation and the Limits of Legislative Reciprocity, examines the causes and consequences of bipartisan collaboration in U.S. legislatures. I seek to understand what allows for bipartisan collaboration, and alternatively, what forces disrupt it. In our current era of intense two-party conflict, understanding what can get our lawmakers to work together across party lines is more important than ever, especially considering that the alternative to bipartisan compromise is gridlock.