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.

Works in Progress

6. 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 a progressive insurgent movement 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. This paper shows that despite this, insurgents pushed Democrats’ policy agenda 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 empirically evaluates the theory’s main 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 interviews with 42 candidates. It finds that progressive insurgents achieved moderate turnover. Democrats minimally rhetorically accommodated insurgent policies and moderately legislatively accommodated them. Incumbents who faced insurgent primary challenges increased their accommodation significantly. Once primaried, their accommodation increased by 70-160% of Democrats’ rhetorical average and 20-75% of Democrats’ legislative average. Party financial and statutory pushback varied in intensity. 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 within the Democratic Party.

5. 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.

4. Jacob S. Hacker, Amelia Malpas, and Paul Pierson, "Stronger Together: The Unexpected Resilience of America's Democratic Party," 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.

3. Mike Cowburn, Amelia Malpas, and Rachel M. Blum, Comparative Factions: How Connectivity and Policy Fractured Party Politics, book project in progress. (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 lack a consistent measure to see inside the "black box" of parties, hindering our ability to study factions comparatively or understand the drivers of temporal trends. We construct an original dataset of party factionalism in candidate and leadership contests, national legislatures, and party organizations between 1990 and 2024 for all major parties across seven countries: the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, United States, Canada, and Mexico. We use this combination of sources to propose a composite measure of party factionalism that can be used comparatively across time and space. Under this measure, we find that factional conflict in many of these parties steadily declined during the 1990s and early 2000s, then increased from 2007 onward. Increased factionalism was primarily driven by conflict in the traditional parties of the center-right (conservatives and Christian democrats) and center-left (social democrats). Trends of growing intra-party factionalism are commonly attributed to parties "opening up" their processes with more intra-party democracy that include more diverse actors. Instead, we show that our descriptive trends are more closely connected to the entrance of new issues into the political sphere (policy) and the new affordances of digital technology that enable faction-oriented actors to foster horizontal and vertical connections (connectivity). 

2. Jacob S. Hacker, 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. Ian Berlin, Jacob S. Hacker, Fiona Kniaz, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, Eric Scheuch, and Sam Zacher, "Democratic Demanders: Organized Power and Networks within the Contemporary Democratic Party Coalition," paper in progress. (Presentations: APSA 2024.)