Political Science Professor Published in The Journal of Politics

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Alejandra Campos, assistant professor of political science and Latino studies.

Alejandra Campos, assistant professor of political science and Latino studies, was featured in the October volume of The Journal of Politics. Campos' article, titled "The Legislative Legacy of Voter Identification Laws," was co-authored by Jeffrey J. Harden of Notre Dame and Austin Bussing of Trinity University. The article is featured in Volume 86, Number 4, of The Journal of Politics. In it, Campos, Harden, and Bussing examine the implementation of voter identification laws and their effects on the United States' voting and legislative processes.

"We theorize that these laws alter legislative candidates' perceived uncertainty about their districts' median voters, which creates centrifugal forces on their ideological positions and ultimately magnifies partisan divisions," the authors write in the abstract. "To test this theory, we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in voter ID law implementation induced by the timing of postenactment legal challenges. We find empirical support; a law going in force widens interparty ideological distance. This divergence may be stronger for Republican parties, does not appear in other contentious policies and is not an artifact of the legislative agenda. Thus, a crucial legacy of these laws is the amplification of political conflict. By creating conditions that stifle compromise and bipartisanship, voter ID requirements indirectly threaten the quality of American democracy."

Campos, a Diane D. Blair Fellow, completed her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame and returned to the U of A, where she earned her M.A. in political science and B.A. in political science and Spanish, as an assistant professor of political science. Campos' research interests include American politics, Latinx/o/a politics, elections and participation, legislators and behavior, immigration and politics, and experimental design, measurement and scaling. Her research focuses on voting costs and democracy, particularly examining their effects on minority candidate emergence and the consequences of the 2013 Shelby County decision.

Established in 1939 and published for the Southern Political Science Association, The Journal of Politics is a leading general-interest journal of political science and the oldest regional political science journal in the United States. The scholarship published in The Journal of Politics is theoretically innovative and methodologically diverse, and comprises a blend of the various intellectual approaches that make up the discipline.

The Journal of Politics features balanced treatments of research from scholars around the world, in all subfields of political science, including American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory and political methodology.

Contact Mallory Gevaert at 773-834-5192 or mgevaert@uchicago.edu for more information.