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." (R&R 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.

• "Measuring Pivotality in a Realized Agenda: The Vote-Specific Shapley-Owen Value." (with Keith Dougherty, under review at Political Science Research and Methods)

Abstract: Who pivots actual votes? Many spatial power indexes measure pivotality across a continuum of equally likely issue directions even though the issues considered by actual legislatures are neither uniformly distributed nor continuous. Building on recent extensions of the Shapley-Owen value, we introduce the vote-specific Shapley-Owen value (vs-SOV) — a measure of pivotality over realized votes. The vs-SOV maps roll calls to normalized issue directions, accommodates vote-specific participation, and extends to bloc voting. We model these extensions then apply the index to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787. We find that pivotality was issue-dependent, New York’s delegation would have continued pivoting if it participated throughout the convention, and several of the Convention’s most prominent delegates held no pivotal power.

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

Abstract: Congressional elections are increasingly shaped by national partisan conflict, raising questions about the electoral relevance of locally oriented representation. I argue that constituency service has asymmetric electoral consequences: as constituents expect competent and responsive assistance, poor service should be electorally costly, while exceptional service must compete with powerful national political cues and should yield smaller gains. I test these expectations with a preregistered conjoint experiment using a nationally representative sample of 2,000 U.S. eligible voters, varying constituency service quality alongside the dominant cues that structure congressional vote choice. Poor-quality service substantially reduces electoral support relative to average-quality service, while high-quality service produces a smaller positive effect. The reward for high-quality service is greater in same-party than cross-party comparisons, while poor service remains costly in both contexts. Voters less strongly anchored by partisan and ideological considerations, as well as lower-knowledge voters, also respond more positively to high-quality service. Constituency service thus remains a meaningful component of electoral accountability in nationalized elections.

• "sov: An R Package for Traditional and Vote-Specific Shapley-Owen Values." (with Keith Dougherty, in preparation for journal submission)

Abstract: The sov package provides an open-source framework for calculating spatial power indices, connecting ideal point estimation with cooperative game theory in R. While existing R packages compute preference-free, a priori indices, sov enables researchers to evaluate voting power based on legislator preferences within a single or multidimensional policy space. The package implements both the uniform Shapley-Owen Value (SOV) and the empirical Vote-Specific Shapley-Owen Value (vs-SOV). By natively importing coordinate matrices and cutting planes from widely used scaling software such as wnominate, oc, and MCMCpack, sov computes spatial power indices directly from the outputs of ideal-point estimation, filling a gap in the R ecosystem for a posteriori power analysis. The empirical utility of the package is demonstrated using historical roll-call data from the 88th U.S. Senate.

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.