American Politics & Political Economy
Email: jcory@umich.edu
Dissertation Title: “The Diffusion of Policing Innovations Among the States”
Committee: Charles Shipan (chair), Robert Mickey, Kenneth Lowande
Teaching: I enjoy teaching and working with students to help them improve and sharpen their ideas and research skills. I see myself not only as a direct resource but also as someone who can facilitate students’ discussions with each other. This is especially important to me because I am passionate about students incorporating peer-work and activities into their learning. My goals are to ensure that students are familiarized with the discipline of political science and understand how to consume empirical research, even if they are not carrying out empirical research on their own. I look forward to teaching courses in American politics that focus on Congress, the bureaucracy, the separation of powers, and political institutions more broadly. I would also like to teach courses on the public policy process. I am comfortable and have experience working with large introductory classes as well as smaller, more focused classes.
Research Interests: My main area of research is American politics, with a focus on political institutions and public policy (e.g., crime, firearms, and policing). My background in public administration has influenced my approach to the study of both subjects because I see institutions as both their formal rules and as organizations that are influenced by their environment, resources, and culture. In practice, this means my research is often focused on evaluating how organizational factors influence public policy and its spread. I do so by conducting quantitative analyses backed by careful and often original large scale data collection.
My dissertation consists of three quantitative papers that are connected by the theme of policy adoption in the areas of policing and criminal justice. The first paper studies the adoption of body cameras by sheriff's offices across the country. I collect an original dataset of body camera adoptions by sheriffs across the country and I hypothesize that shootings by law enforcement agencies in a county drive that county’s sheriff’s office to adopt body cameras. My second paper studies the adoption of Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights (LEOBR) legislation across the states. I test the hypothesis that unified Republican legislatures in states that experience high rates of violent crime are associated with the adoption of these laws. The final chapter in my dissertation looks at the adoption of “shall issue'' concealed carry laws. I use time series data from all states and argue that the presence of more gun owners in a state is associated with the subsequent adoption of shall issue laws in that state. I find support for that hypothesis after using the appropriate set of controls. I am currently working on extending my study of body camera adoption to large cities, not only to do inference on police forces (in addition to sheriff’s offices), but also to study how competition in a policy area influences adoption.
