My research concerns how governments, corporations, and other large institutions influence citizens’ civic and political engagement, and how that engagement shapes those institutions in return.

 Primarily, my research considers how institutions influence citizens' civic and political behavior. My recent work reports on how political interest groups and business trade associations have encouraged the development of more private forms of political activism since the 1970s.   Many large institutions now engage in “grassroots lobbying” campaigns that subsidize citizen activism to promote their interests before local, state, and federal legislatures.  I also study how citizens shape institutional policies: through non-profit community organizations on the one hand, and through protest activism on the other. My ongoing study of poor people’s community organizations shows how such groups mobilize their members for improved social and economic conditions.  On protest activism, my research disentangles the complex relationships between protest tactics, institutional targets, identity groups, issues, and claims.

  I am new to UVM as of 2007, and completed my Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University. I teach courses in the areas of sociological theory, social movements, and the nonprofit and voluntary sector.  I have presented my research at a variety of conferences across the U.S. and in Asia, and my work has appeared in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Sociological Forum, Public Opinion Quarterly, Mobilization, Contemporary Sociology, and in the edited volume Membership Based Organizations of the Poor (Routledge, 2007).  A recent manuscript on protest (with Andrew Martin and John D. McCarthy) appears in the American Journal of Sociology.