Three Essays on Measuring Political Behaviour

My DPhil thesis would build on my current MPhil research to answer this puzzle within the context of American direct democracy. It would seek to explain the interactions and dynamics between ballot initiative and state representative campaigns. More broadly, this work would directly engage with how direct and representative forms of democracy coexist and the implications this has for policymaking. This research would therefore broaden our understanding of policymaking and draw together several, currently disparate, aspects of the broader literature on policymaking, voting and responsiveness. Through a mixed-methods approach, I will develop our understanding of initiative campaign ideology and political responsiveness. By using contribution data to map out the ideology of donors, I can place ballot initiative proposals in the same ideological space as politicians and compare across these two distinct types of campaigns. This quantitative work will demonstrate how support for these the two types of campaign differ, within and across issue areas. Moreover, through a qualitative component, I will substantiate these findings with a detailed study of state legislators' motivations for taking up or ignoring issues within the legislature. Why do legislators "own" certain issues, but not others? In combination, this research will provide an important contribution to our understanding of the relation between direct and representative forms of democracy. My work will provide a better explanation of how modern systems of policymaking aggregate citizens' preferences.