David Beavers, "Spreading the News: Strategic News Sharing in Congressional e-Newsletters"
Members of Congress increasingly communicate directly with constituents through digital channels such as e-newsletters. These communications allow representatives not only to signal priorities and positions, but also to shape how constituents encounter political information. By selectively sharing links to news outlets, members may cultivate a home style, emphasize local or national concerns, and steer audiences toward particular sources of (potentially partisan) news. In this project, we examine how members of Congress (MCs) share links to news media in constituent e-newsletters between 2010 and 2024. Among the questions we're interested in exploring are: How much do MCs share local vs. national media, and how has that changed over time and across parties? How much do MCs share partisan vs. nonpartisan media, and how has that changed over time and across parties? What factors predict differences in how MCs cultivate a home style through strategic news-sharing? To answer these questions, we intend to perform a content analysis of 191,358 e-newsletters and conduct an elite survey of press secretaries and communications directors to better understand how e-newsletters fit into MCs' broader communications strategies.
Stephanie Ternullo, "The Politics of Rural College Attendance"
Three related trends have reshaped American politics in recent years. The first is a growing association between college education and Democratic Party affiliation (Grossmann and Hopkins 2024), which has been mirrored by an increasing link between college education and place – namely, that college-educated Americans are clustering in cities rather than rural areas (Autor 2019). These two trends together contribute to a third—increasing polarization across the urban-rural divide (Mettler and Brown 2025; Jacobs and Shea 2023; Cramer 2016). In recent years, scholars have developed insightful explanations for these transformations, but they have paid far less attention to some of the key actors caught in the headwinds of these shifts: rural families whose children leave to attend college and don’t come back. For many families, this may be a dual departure. When young people from rural areas attend college, they are more likely to move to cities in search of employment (Carr and Kefalas 2009), and also more likely to adopt socially liberal policy attitudes that may be at odds with their families’ politics (Scott 2022). This means that understanding the micro-level processes that shape rural students’ politics, career decisions, and familial relationships after entering college can shed light on these broader trends. These are the questions that this project takes up: How do rural students’ experiences during college shape their politics in ways that are at odds with, or reinforce, the values they’ve learned from their parents? How do families navigate these changes? And to what extent do these experiences inform the way parents think about the role of college campuses and urban centers as sites of liberalism, and even liberal indoctrination?
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260310T160000Z DTEND:20260310T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR