Austin Hart

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. My fields of study are comparative politics and research methodology with an emphasis on political campaigns and political behavior. My dissertation advances a campaign centered theory of economic voting and analyzes the political impact of economic campaign rhetoric in Mexico and the United States. Contrary to the conventional assumption that presidential candidates have little influence over when and to what extent economic voting occurs, I argue that economic campaign messages systematically condition the strength of the economic vote. I find the effect on the final vote tally is substantial, even electorally decisive. More broadly, the results demonstrate the power of political campaigns to overcome structural conditions thought to advantage or disadvantage incumbent-party candidates and begin to explain the seemingly anomalous victories of challengers in economic booms and reelection of incumbents in busts. read more

My ongoing research has been funded by multiple sources, including a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Improvement Grant and an NSF-funded grant from Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS). My previous research on the impact of neoliberal economic reform on partisan policy making in South America has been published recently in Comparative Political Studies. Download the paper.