I plan to work with two research assistants to develop new instructional materials for use in undergraduate and graduate courses in public policy and the American Political Economy. The cases will be designed for courses that use concepts from political science and public policy to help students develop an intuition for the behavioral and institutional forces that constrain the public policy process and its outcomes in the United States. To help students develop this intuition, we will draw on several policy-oriented theories of politics developed within the scholarly neighborhood of the CAPE community. Key concepts include agenda setting and problem definition; ideological approaches to public policy; the organization of interests; political representation and accountability; institutional roles, structures, change, and constraints on policymaking; historical contingency; policy implementation, diffusion, feedback, and retrenchment; policy evaluation as a political exercise; federalism; and the role of science and expertise in policymaking. The data sources for the cases will primarily consist of news articles, along with scholarly articles from the American Political Economy and public policy literatures. For each case, we will compile a set of teaching materials that can be available to other scholars teaching courses about the American political economy and the politics of public policymaking.
Meet the Grantees
Parrish Bergquist
Faculty member
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University of Pennsylvania
I am an Assistant Professor at at the University of Pennsylvania's Political Science Department. I study the political determinants of environmental policy—in the US and abroad—with a particular focus on public will and political behavior. The three major strands of my research focus on explaining the development of attitudes and policy views about climate change and the environment, examining how public environmental concern is activated in the political system, and explaining the drivers and consequences of state-level climate policies in the polarized US political context. My research has been published in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, and Environmental Research Letters. I received my PhD from MIT in political science and urban studies & planning in 2019.
