Research

Dr. Blum’s research focuses on party factions and their impact on contemporary US politics. Here’s a list of her recent publications and projects.

Book

How the Tea Party Captured the GOP (University of Chicago Press), 2020.

Articles

“How Local Factions Pressure Parties: Activist Groups and Primary Contests in the Tea Party Era,” at the British Journal of Political Science (with Mike Cowburn), 2023.
“Conditional Congressional communication: how elite speech varies across medium,” at Political Science Research Methods (with Lindsey Cormack and Kelsey Shoub), 2023.
“Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right”, at Perspectives on Politics (with Christopher Parker), 2019.
“Student-run exit polls 101,” at PS: Political Science and Politics (with Sarah E. Croco, Elizabeth Suhay, Lilliana Mason, Hans Noel, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael A. Bailey), 2019.

Ongoing projects

“Parties in Miniature: Where Factions Fit in U.S. Party Coalitions” in Placing Parties in American Political Development, eds. Adam Hilton and Jessica Hejny (R&R at the University of Pennsylvania Press as of November 2022).
Research on the MAGA movement with Christopher S. Parker, including: “Will the Real Republicans Please Stand Up?: Election Denial and the Rift on the American Right,” under review at Public Opinion Quarterly with Christopher S. Parker, submitted March 2023.
“Who Decides?: Media, MAGA, Money, and Mentions in the 2022 Republican Primaries,” under review at Perspectives on Politics with Mike Cowburn and Seth Masket.
“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)
“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 with William Bianco and Josh McCrain).
Several projects using data from the 2022 CES with Nathan Barron, Peter McLaughlin, Bennie Ashton, Chuck Finnochario, and Michael Crespin, including: “The Trump Effect: Experimental Evidence on Public Perceptions of Trump Endorses.”

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).

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Complete CV

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Complete CV

Publications

How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics

(University of Chicago Press, forthcoming August 2020).

The rise of the Tea Party redefined both the Republican Party and how we think about intraparty conflict. What initially appeared to be an anti-Obama protest movement of fiscal conservatives matured into a faction that sought to increase its influence in the Republican Party by any means necessary. Tea Partiers captured the party’s organizational machinery and used it to replace established politicians with Tea Party–style Republicans, eventually laying the groundwork for the nomination and election of a candidate like Donald Trump.

In How the Tea Party Captured the GOP, Rachel Marie Blum approaches the Tea Party from the angle of party politics, explaining the Tea Party’s insurgent strategies as those of a party faction. Click here for more.

Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right.

Rachel Blum and Christopher Parker. Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 3 (September 2019): 737-755. (Replication files) Click here for more.

“Student-Run Exit Polls 101.”

Croco, Sarah E., Elizabeth Suhay, Rachel Blum, Lilliana Mason, Hans Noel, Jonathan Ladd, and Michael A. Bailey. PS: Political Science & Politics 52, no. 2 (2019): 361–66. doi:10.1017/S1049096518002330. Click here for more.

Conditional Congressional communication: how elite speech varies across medium

Blum, Rachel, Lindsey Cormack, and Kelsey Shoub. “Conditional Congressional Communication: How Elite Speech Varies across Medium.” Political Science Research and Methods 11, no. 2 (2023): 394–401. doi:10.1017/psrm.2022.28.

Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach

Solomon Messing, Patrick Van Kessel, Adam Hughes, Nick Judd, and Rachel M.Blum,

“Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach,” a Pew Research Center Report

(February 2017). Click here for more.

Is there such a thing as a Conservative Foreign Policy?

Rachel M. Blum and Christopher S. Parker, “Is there such a thing as a Conservative

Foreign Policy?” in the Brookings Governance Series (October 2014).

Click here for more.

A Tangled Web: Religion and the Regime in the US

Rachel M. Blum and Clyde Wilcox, “A Tangled Web: Religion and the Regime in the

US,” in Religion and Regimes: Support, Separation, and Opposition, eds.Ted Jelen and

Tehran Tamadonfar (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2013).

Click here for more.

Publications

How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics

(University of Chicago Press, forthcoming August 2020).

Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right.

Rachel Blum and Christopher Parker. Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 3 (September 2019): 737-755. (Replication files) Click here for more.

“Student-Run Exit Polls 101.”

Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach

Solomon Messing, Patrick Van Kessel, Adam Hughes, Nick Judd, and Rachel M.Blum,

“Partisan Conflict and Congressional Outreach,” a Pew Research Center Report

(February 2017). Click here for more.

Is there such a thing as a Conservative Foreign Policy?

Rachel M. Blum and Christopher S. Parker, “Is there such a thing as a Conservative

Foreign Policy?” in the Brookings Governance Series (October 2014).

Click here for more.

A Tangled Web: Religion and the Regime in the US

Rachel M. Blum and Clyde Wilcox, “A Tangled Web: Religion and the Regime in the

US,” in Religion and Regimes: Support, Separation, and Opposition, eds.Ted Jelen and

Tehran Tamadonfar (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2013).

Click here for more.

Panel Study Of The MAGA Movement

The Panel Study of the MAGA Movement (PSMM) is a survey designed to assess the attitudes and behavior of the people who consider themselves part of the “Make America Great Again” movement, popularized by the Trump campaign in 2016.