Selected Publications

Book chapters:

• Ainsworth, Scott H., and Emma Bibina. Forthcoming. “Continuity and Instability among K Street Lobbying Firms.” In Interest Group Politics, 10th ed., edited by Anthony J. Nownes, Allan J. Cigler, and Burdett A. Loomis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Bibina, Emma, and Jamie Carson. Forthcoming. “Congress in a Nationalized Age: Elections, Representation, and Governing.” In New Directions in Congressional Politics, 3rd ed., edited by Jamie Carson and Michael Lynch. New York: Routledge.

• Okunev, Igor, Petr Oskolkov, Maria Tislenko, Emma Bibina, and Rostislav Shilovskiy. 2022. Transforming the Administrative Matryoshka: The Reform of Autonomous Okrugs in the Russian Federation 2003-2008. ibidem-Verlag.

Peer-reviewed articles:

• Okunev, Igor, Marianna Shestakova, and Emma Bibina. 2020. “Neighborhood with Russia: Implications for Regional Differentiation of Public Opinion in Belarus.” Russia in Global Affairs 18, no. 4: 10–36.

Working papers

• "Do Voters Reward Earmarks? Evidence from Survey Experimental and Observational Data." (Under review at Political Behavior)

Abstract: Members of Congress frequently claim credit for securing local projects or, alternatively, advertise their opposition to pork-barrel spending. These competing strategies suggest that legislators believe constituents care about earmarks, or targeted federal spending that incumbents request for their districts. Yet, contemporary House elections are increasingly shaped by partisanship, presidential alignment, and national policy conflict. This article asks whether earmarks actually influence voters’ electoral evaluations of their U.S. House representatives. I argue that earmarks provide, at most, a limited electoral cue. Although voters may value local benefits, earmark information must compete with stronger partisan and national considerations, making broad and consistent electoral rewards unlikely. I test this argument using two complementary studies. First, I conduct a pre-registered survey experiment in which respondents receive either information about their incumbent’s Community Project Funding record or information about routine constituency service. Second, I combine respondent-level data from the 2022 and 2024 Cooperative Election Study with Government Accountability Office data on secured Community Project Funding to examine whether earmarking activity predicts reported incumbent vote choice. Across both studies, I find little evidence that earmarks generate electoral rewards. Earmark information does not increase vote likelihood in the experiment, and larger earmark allocations are not consistently associated with incumbent support in actual elections.

• "Pivotal Voters at the U.S. Constitutional Convention: Shapley-Owen Values Reconsidered." (with Keith Dougherty, under review at Political Analysis)

Abstract: Classic power indexes evaluate a voter’s influence by assuming that all coalitions are equally likely to form. While spatial refinements such as the Shapley-Owen Value (SOV) restrict coalition formation to ideological preferences, they assume that issues arise uniformly along the edge of a continuous hypersphere. This paper introduces the vote-specific Shapley-Owen Value (vs-SOV), a preference based index that estimates voting power using the distribution of issue directions observed in realized roll-call votes. We provide an algorithm that accommodates weighted voting, various voting thresholds, and bloc voting. Because vs-SOVs are constructed from discrete events, they naturally account for dynamic fluctuations in attendance, permit counterfactual simulations, and enable the disaggregation of power across substantive issue areas. We demonstrate the empirical utility of this framework by re-examining which delegate was most pivotal at the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787. We find that power varied by issue area, qualifying prevailing accounts that Roger Sherman was most likely to cast the decisive vote on any issue. Software is provided to implement the model.

• "Beyond Party and Policy: The Electoral Impact of Candidate Responsiveness to Constituents." (In preparation for journal submission)

Abstract: American elections are increasingly shaped by partisan polarization and nationalized political debate, raising questions about whether voters still value locally oriented representation. This article advances a theoretical account of constituency service in which quality – rather than quantity – structures how voters evaluate responsiveness. I argue that constituency service operates as a baseline expectation: voters may offer limited rewards for high-quality service, but they impose meaningful electoral penalties when service falls short. To test this argument, I field a pre-registered conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of 2,000 U.S. eligible voters, varying candidate characteristics including party, policy priorities, and the quality of constituency service. The results reveal a clear asymmetry: low-quality service significantly reduces electoral support, while high-quality service produces smaller and more conditional gains. The effects of service quality are not uniform across the electorate. Low-knowledge voters show the clearest evidence of greater sensitivity to service quality, including stronger penalties for poor service and larger rewards for high-quality service. Independents and voters with weaker ideological attachments appear more responsive primarily to high-quality service, while outpartisanship and socioeconomic status do not meaningfully condition these effects. These findings show that even in nationalized elections, local service quality remains electorally relevant, especially when representatives fail to meet basic expectations of responsiveness.

Work in progress

• "Local Roots, National Tides: How Candidate Background Shapes Congressional Advertising."

Abstract: This paper examines how candidates’ local roots shape the content of congressional campaign advertising in an increasingly nationalized and polarized political environment. Recent literature shows that legislators with strong local ties behave systematically differently from their non-local counterparts, placing greater emphasis on constituency engagement and district representation. Building on this insight, I argue that these differences extend to campaign strategy: locally rooted candidates are more likely to emphasize biography, community connection, and district-specific issues in their advertising, reflecting their closer ties to and awareness of local needs. To improve the measurement of local roots, I construct a new composite index that integrates existing indicators of geographic and social embeddedness with original survey evidence from a YouGov study of 2,000 respondents. The survey elicits voters’ own definitions of what it means for a candidate to be “local” and evaluates the perceived importance of different components of local rootedness. Using data from the Wesleyan Media Project on candidate-sponsored television advertisements from 2018-2020, I estimate models evaluating the likelihood that candidates emphasize local versus national themes in their ads as a function of their level of local rootedness. This project contributes to research on campaign strategy and political representation by clarifying how local embeddedness may shape candidate communication in nationalized electoral contexts.