Research

Academic Articles

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

5. Amelia Malpas, "Tea Party of the Left? Progressive Insurgent Influence in the Democratic Party, 2018-2022," under review. (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.

4. Amelia Malpas and Sam Zacher, "'In This House We Believe': The Housing Crisis, Redistribution, and Renter-Homeowner Divides among Democrats," under review. (Presentations: Consortium on the American Political Economy Junior Working Group 2023, APSA 2024.)

The intensifying housing crisis in America is disproportionately impacting the nation's biggest metropolitan areas. At the same time, the Democratic electoral coalition has dominated these metros, as Democratic politicians have increasingly won support from affluent, educated urban and suburban homeowners. These interacting dynamics have produced a wide gulf of housing wealth and economic precarity between Democratic renters and homeowners. Given the power of shared partisanship in American politics, does this economic divide among Democratic voters translate into policy and candidate preference differences in the coalition? We argue that, indeed, Democratic renters are far more likely than homeowners to favor more aggressive state intervention to mitigate inequality. Specifically, we show that Democratic renters are often more likely than homeowners to support the most left-leaning presidential candidate and redistributive housing policies. Democratic renters are more likely to intensely prefer more public housing but only mildly more supportive of non-housing redistribution. To support these claims, we analyze an array of survey data, including from a 2020 ballot proposition and original data measuring preference intensity. These findings carry implications for the contemporary politics of metro-area housing, the Democratic Party politics of redistribution, and the interaction of economic interests and political identities.

3. Mike Cowburn, Amelia Malpas, and Rachel M. Blum, "Measuring Intra-Party Factional Conflict: A Comparative Approach Using Leadership Contests," revise & resubmit, part of book project. (Presentations: APSA 2024, MPSA 2025, Harvard Center for European Studies Graduate Workshop 2025, EPSA 2025.)

Intra-party factions have attracted increased scholarly attention in the twenty-first century as party systems have fragmented. Yet, we still lack a comparative approach to identify factional conflict. We offer a novel qualitatively derived approach to operationalizing factional conflict using patterns of support in leadership contests. We apply our approach to an original dataset of 247 leadership contests from thirty-one parties in seven democracies between 1990 and 2024. We find that rates of factional conflict in leadership contests in mainstream parties increased significantly from the first decade of the twenty-first century onwards. Niche parties did not experience increasing factional conflict during this period. We discuss the benefits and limitations of our contribution, implications of our empirical finding, and directions for future development and application.

2. Lucas Kreuzer and Amelia Malpas, "Pathways of Industrial-to-Knowledge Economy Change and Partisan Realignment in the (Post)Industrial Midwest," working paper. (Presentations: APSA 2025.)

The transition from the industrial to the knowledge economy has given rise to profound economic and political cleavages. In the United States, a handful of metros now produce most economic output and political parties sort along the urban-rural divide. Recent case studies of place examine this transformation. These works typically offer a pathway, a distinct pattern of industrial to knowledge economy change, that produces partisan realignment. Our paper employs novel indicators and original precinct elections data to trace these pathways and their realignments systematically from 1976 to 2025 across the (post)industrial midwestern states of Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (N = 426,998). We use spatial autoregressive models with the precinct data and matching models with the survey data to uncover the relationship between pathways and realignment. We find a strong relationship between pathways and knowledge economy realignment, largely independent of place. Rural places with KE activity have turned Democratic like knowledge economy metros. Conversely, deindustrializing urban places have turned Republican like deindustrializing rural towns. We argue that much of the urban-rural divide in American politics is due to the high overlap of place and economic pathway and that this realignment is driven by economic change. This piece contributes empirically to literature on the urban-rural divide and knowledge economy realignment.

1. Jacob S. Hacker, Amelia Malpas, and Paul Pierson, "Fork in the Road: The Developmental Divergence of the Democratic and Republican Parties," working paper. (Presentations: APSA 2023.) 

Recent decades have been a slow-moving crisis for parties of the center-left. Yet America’s Democratic Party, the largest center-left party in the rich world, has remained strikingly robust. In particular, it has successfully managed the intra-party fragmentation that can plague center-left parties in majoritarian systems, where safe urban districts pull the center left away from the median voter. More unexpected—and more important, given the stakes as Republicans have increasingly embraced authoritarianism—Democrats have managed the centrifugal pressures created by their left flank better than Republicans have managed those created by their right flank. In this paper, we seek to understand why. The contrast cannot easily be explained by macro-institutions like majoritarian elections that affect both parties. Indeed, the non-urban-based Republicans should be less prone to such pressures given the more efficient geographic distribution of their voters. Instead, we emphasize the strongly asymmetric character of the parties’ trajectories over the past three decades due to the self-reinforcing interplay of voters, elites, and allied media. These differing developmental pathways have helped foster and reinforce two distinct strategic orientations within the Democratic Party. The first is a broad wariness among party elites (and, to a lesser extent, voters) of succumbing to the electoral risks faced by a metro-based party—a strategic response that we call the “paradox of disadvantage.” The second distinctive orientation is a much greater commitment to lawmaking to achieve party aims, which we call Democrats’ “imperative of governance.” Thus, party elites within each party now face fundamentally different incentive structures—one that strengthens moderate forces in the case of Democrats and reinforces the right wing in the case of Republicans. Democrats offer unique insight into the crisis of the center-left in part because they have responded to the real disadvantages they face with a “big tent” approach notably lacking on the other partisan side.

Works in Progress

3. Amelia Malpas, "Not All Young Men: Labor Market Structures and the Political Gender Gap among Young People," paper in progress. (Presentations: Consortium on the American Political Economy Research Conference 2025.)

2. Jacob S. Hacker, Lucas Kreuzer, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, and Eric Scheuch, "Metro Consciousness: The Knowledge Economy and the Changing Geography of the Democratic Party," paper in progress. (Presentations: APSA 2024.) 

1. Jacob S. Hacker, Fiona Kniaz, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, and Sam Zacher, "A Party Pulled Left? Factions and Foundations in the Contemporary Democratic Coalition," paper in progress. (Presentations: APSA 2024, APSA 2025.)