Dr. Blum’s research focuses on party factions and their impact on contemporary US politics. Along with her 2020 book, How the Tea Party Captured the GOP (University of Chicago Press), this includes a recent article in Perspectives on Politics, “Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right” (with Christopher Parker).

Dr. Blum’s research agenda encompasses several ongoing projects. Projects near completion or under review include: The Enemy Within, a book manuscript hat explores the MAGA movement and its impact on American democracy (with Chris Parker, read more about our MAGA panel study below); Parties in Miniature: Where Factions Fit in U.S. Party Coalitions, a working draft of a chapter for an edited volume about contemporary parties; “Legislative Communication: The Media of Choice across Congress,” a comprehensive analysis of constituent-facing Congressional communication (with Kelsey Shoub and Lindsey Cormack, under review); “How Local Factions Pressure Parties: Activist Groups and Primary Contests in the Tea Party Era,” an article using a difference-in-difference research design to assess the Tea Party’s impact on contemporary parties and polarization (with Mike Cowburn, under review); “Measuring Partisanship in Congressional Speech,” which uses machine learning techniques to generate member-level ideology estimates using five corpora of public speech (with Kelsey Shoub, Jon Green, and Lindsey Cormack); “Factions in Party Nomination Networks,” a network-based analysis of presidential endorsement patterns (with Hans Noel); and “Representation, Responsiveness, and COVID-19,” a comprehensive research project examining the political roots of inequities in the U.S. domestic COVID-19 response (Russell Sage Grant Proposal with William Bianco and Josh McCrain, revise and resubmit).