Research

Academic Articles

3. Mike Cowburn, Amelia Malpas, and Rachel M. Blum, "Measuring Factional Conflict: A Comparative Approach Using Party Leadership Contests," Party Politics FirstView. 

Intra-party factions have attracted increased scholarly attention in the twenty-first century as party systems have fragmented. Yet, we lack a comparative approach to identify factional conflict. We offer a novel, qualitatively derived approach to operationalize factional conflict using patterns of support in leadership contests. We apply our approach to an original dataset of 205 leadership contests from twenty-nine parties in six consolidated democracies between 1990 and 2024. Empirically, we find that rates of factional conflict in mainstream parties increased from the first decade of the twenty-first century onwards. Niche parties had significantly less factional conflict during this period. We discuss the benefits and limitations of our approach, implications of our empirical finding, and directions for future development and application.

2. Jacob S. Hacker, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, and Sam Zacher, "Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats' New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution," Perspectives on Politics 22, no. 3 (2024): 609-629.

The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavily on voters of color than any other major party in American history. Many analysts have argued that the Democratic Party has managed this sea change by shifting from economic to cultural and identity appeals. This claim is consistent with leading models of two-dimensional party competition, as well as a fair amount of cross-national research on parties of the left and center-left in contemporary knowledge economies. However, we find little evidence for this claim in national Democrats’ messaging (via party platforms and on Twitter), nor, more important, in their actual policy efforts. Instead, we show that even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the Blue Divide not by foreswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism, but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program—albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multi-racial coalition. Understanding how and why Democrats have taken this path is central to understanding not just the party’s response to its shifting electorate, but the way parties manage coalitional change more broadly.

1. Amelia Malpas and Adam Hilton, "Retreating from Redistribution? Trends in Democratic Party Fidelity to Economic Equality, 1984-2020," The Forum 19, no. 2 (2021): 283-316. 

During his presidency, Barack Obama described rising economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” But a growing number of scholars and journalists argue that rising inequality is in part a result of the Democratic Party’s diminishing fidelity to an egalitarian economic agenda and its embrace of neoliberalism. In this article, we assess the veracity of this claim through a content analysis of all national Democratic Party platforms issued since 1984. We find that broad assertions of Democratic retreat from economic equality are for the most part exaggerated. Specifically, we argue that Democrats’ support for egalitarian policies has been complex and varied over time, with a marked decline under the influence of the New Democrats in the 1990s followed by a significant resurgence thereafter. However, while party support for equalizing policies has rebounded overall, the extent of the party’s commitment to specific policies varies according to the purported deservingness of beneficiaries. Our findings have important implications for debates concerning Democratic Party change, the politics of inequality, and the policy agenda of the Joe Biden administration.

Working Papers

4. Amelia Malpas, "Tea Party of the Left? Progressive Insurgent Influence in the Democratic Party, 2018-2022," working paper. (Presentations: MPSA 2023, Yale Graduate Workshop in American Politics 2023.)  

Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination twice. But his “political revolution” continued through progressive insurgents in the House of Representatives. A few, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, defeated incumbents in primaries, creating intraparty dynamics reminiscent of Tea Party candidates’ challenge to Republicans. Most progressive insurgents lost. Despite this, insurgents pushed Democrats in a social democratic direction. How did the progressive insurgency influence Democrats’ policy agenda when most candidates lost? To answer, this paper develops a theory of insurgency and insurgent-driven party change. It evaluates theoretical mechanisms—insurgent electoral turnover, incumbent policy accommodation, and party pushback—via causal and descriptive quantitative analysis of original campaign, Twitter, and cosponsorship datasets and qualitative analysis of 42 candidate interviews. It finds that progressive insurgents effected moderate turnover. Democrats minimally rhetorically accommodated insurgent policies and moderately legislatively accommodated them. Incumbents who faced insurgent primary challenges significantly increased their accommodation. Once primaried, their accommodation was 70-160% higher than Democrats’ rhetorical average and 20-75% higher than Democrats’ legislative average. Party financial and statutory pushback varied. Contributing to scholarship on political movements, primary challenges, and party change, this is the first systematic, mixed-method study of the post-Sanders progressives and their influence on Democrats.

3. Lucas Kreuzer and Amelia Malpas, "Pathways of Industrial-to-Knowledge Economy Change and Partisan Realignment in the American Midwest," under review. (Presentations: APSA 2025.)

What is the relative role of density versus economic change in driving recent partisan realignment in the United States? Political scientists emphasize density through the urban-rural divide and economic change through trade shocks. We demonstrate how the industrial-to-knowledge economy transition generates the urban-rural divide. We test the relative relationship between both factors on realignment through two original data sources: (1) a dataset of six Midwestern states’ precinct voting returns from 1984 to 2024 (N=426,998) and (2) precinct-level indicators measuring the industrial and knowledge economies. Using these indicators in a clustering algorithm, we detect three “pathways” - common patterns of economic change - ranging from deindustrialization to knowledge economy growth. We find that the pathways shape realignment to an equal or greater degree than density through spatial regressions, matching, and qualitative description. This paper contributes theoretically and empirically to scholarship on the urban-rural divide, economic divergence, and partisan realignment.

2. Amelia Malpas and Sam Zacher, "Do Renters and Homeowners Support Policies Based on Interests or Partisanship? A Theory of Conditional Preference Formation," under review. (Presentations: Consortium on the American Political Economy Junior Working Group 2023, APSA 2024.) 

Extensive literatures identify partisanship and material interests as consistent---but sometimes conflicting---sources of policy preferences among the mass public. When does partisanship structure voters’ policy views and when do material interests? In this paper, we offer a theory of conditional preference formation. We argue that two conditions, party polarization and national issue salience, shape whether voters are influenced by their partisanship or interests. Specifically, we contend that under the U.S.'s current condition of high polarization, voters’ preferences will follow their party on issues of high national salience and will follow their interests on issues of low national salience. Given the contemporary housing crisis that magnifies the gap in wealth and precarity between renters and homeowners, we test our theory on renters’ and homeowners’ preferences on both housing reforms and economic spending policy across an array of survey data. Our analyses investigate the role of interests across and within parties and the role of partisanship across and within housing statuses. We find support for the conditional preference formation theory, which better predicts preferences than either the classic partisanship or material interests theories would. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to scholarship on preference formation and an empirical contribution to work on housing politics and intra-party politics.

1. Fiona Kniaz, Amelia Malpas, Jacob S. Hacker, and Paul Pierson, "“Old Left, New Left, or One Team? Issue Cleavages and Alignments among Democrats’ Intense Policy Demanders,” paper in progress. (Presentations: APSA 2024, APSA 2025, APSA 2026.) 

A common critique holds that advocacy groups push the Democratic Party toward socially progressive positions that are out of step with its traditional organizational core, labor unions. Do party-aligned advocacy and labor groups diverge in their policy positions and priorities, particularly on social versus economic issues? To investigate, we analyze the legislative activities of 132 well-resourced, Democratic-aligned interest groups, which we call Democratic Intense Policy Demanders (DIPDs). We identify DIPDs through a novel dataset combining campaign spending, lobbying expenditures, nonprofit financials, and nearly 50,000 DIPD positions on specific bills. We measure groups' relative positions within issue areas using a new scaling method grounded in bill cosponsorship, as well as by assessing group alignment with ideological caucuses in the House. Contrary to popular narratives, network analyses show labor unions in the most central positions in the DIPD coalition, anchoring a shared core alongside rights-oriented and progressive advocacy organizations. Issue-by-issue analysis shows that economic policy remains the center of gravity for virtually all DIPD types, while labor's positions on cultural issues closely resemble those of advocacy groups. In our caucus analyses, DIPDs are more aligned with the progressive wing of the party on economic issues and — surprisingly — more aligned with the moderate wing on cultural issues, including immigration. Open conflict is rare and concentrated in the energy/environment domain, and even there, labor and environmental groups rarely disagree on legislation and have actively sought common ground. The paper contributes new evidence and measures to the study of group-party alliances, filling a critical gap between scholarship on voters and party leaders and offering the first systematic, data-driven portrait of the Democratic organized coalition that challenges influential but empirically unexamined claims of a labor-left split.