One day a few years ago, Jeff Harden set out to do something different — complete a research project alone.
And it hasn’t been pretty.
“It has been a very painful process,” Harden said. “It's almost been like using a lawnmower that needs to be oiled really badly.”
Although the work has been arduous, it has also been deeply validating to the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor of Political Science because it proved that his preferred collaborative method is, indeed, the right one.
“With solo work, you are counting on yourself to do all aspects of a paper,” he said. “I know I have the basic tools that I need to do this, but everything seems harder than it should be — it's so strange for me.”
The core of Harden’s research on American politics involves applying statistical methodology to examine how legislative institutions affect representation. And during his decade at the University of Notre Dame, he has worked collaboratively with colleagues, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students on award-winning papers, presentations, and books — combining diverse interests and approaches to answer simple yet broad questions with intricate nuances such as examining voter ID laws’ effects on legislators, politicians’ accountability post-January 6, and even Taylor Swift ticket sales.
"Beyond our collaboration, he’s very generous with his time — always willing to offer feedback and advice at any stage in the research process, and my work is stronger because of it.”
— Erin Rossiter, the Nancy Reeves Dreux Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science
“Collaborating with Jeff was a valuable experience,” said Erin Rossiter, the Nancy Reeves Dreux Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, who worked with Harden on a project examining how Swift’s “Eras Tour” concert ticket sale debacle galvanized voters to hold elected officials accountable. “Our discussions about how to clearly frame our question, build our argument, and do careful empirical work have shaped how I approach my own projects. Beyond our collaboration, he’s very generous with his time — always willing to offer feedback and advice at any stage in the research process, and my work is stronger because of it.”
In recognition of his work, Harden is the recipient of the 2026 College of Arts & Letters Research Award. The honor recognizes faculty who demonstrate significant scholarly achievement and impact, as well as leadership, innovation, and engagement with the University’s research and educational mission.
The award will be presented to Harden at the college’s spring faculty meeting at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 7, in 215/216 McKenna Hall. Kasey Buckles, the Quinn and Jean Stepan Family College Professor of Economics, will receive the Graduate Student Mentorship Award at the same event.
“I don’t really see myself as a solo researcher, so this award feels like it’s recognizing a lot of people,” Harden said. “The work I’ve been doing, especially the last five years, has been exclusively collaborative, and the large majority of that with people at Notre Dame."
Tackling big questions together
Harden’s research ethos began to intertwine with his sense of community while he was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Initially interested in congressional campaigns, Harden connected with mentor Tom Carsey and other political scientists who focused more on state legislatures. He then sharpened his research focus on the relationship between elected officials and their constituents.
“Just the idea that you can study 50 legislatures comparatively instead of just one was really interesting to me,” Harden said. “And it really developed this strong allegiance to the study of state legislatures, as well as the origin of my interest in collaborative work and developing community-based research.”
Harden joined Notre Dame in 2016 and, as a concurrent professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, has further honed his ability to make research-based arguments about how institutions shape legislators' behavior, using empirical evidence from across the country.
“I am deeply interested in the statistical methodology that social scientists use to make the claims that they make,” he said. “I’ve always had an interest in the tools that we use and trying to make them better, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of thinking about how we can safely make a causal claim when we, as researchers, did not fully control the data-generating process.”
Recently, he applied those tools in research that culminated in a Journal of Politics article titled “The Legislative Legacy of Voter Identification Laws,” co-authored with then-graduate student Alejandra Campos ’23, Ph.D., and Austin Bussing of Trinity University, which explored whether voter identification laws have a polarizing effect on state legislatures.
“Methodologically, this posed huge problems because the legislatures that we're trying to study are the ones who implemented the voter ID laws,” Harden said. “So part of that work involves the methodological innovation to be able to sort out the effect of voter ID laws on legislators, independent of whatever led them to implement voter ID laws in the first place.”
This dedication to methodological rigor and scholarly collaboration is a hallmark of Harden's work, and it has not gone unnoticed. It’s this innovative approach to tackling complex issues that has consistently earned him major grants and accolades in the field.
“Just the idea that you can study 50 legislatures comparatively instead of just one was really interesting to me. And it really developed this strong allegiance to the study of state legislatures, as well as the origin of my interest in collaborative work and developing community-based research."
— Jeff Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor in the Department of Political Science.
In 2019, he was a part of a multidisciplinary research team that won a $1 million National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator (C-Accel) grant to create a hub that made it easier to access and analyze data from states on public policy and economic and social outcomes. He’s also received multiple honors from the American Political Science Association, including the State Politics and Policy Section’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2022, the Best Published Paper Award in 2021, and the Best Conference Paper Award in 2017. His first book, Multidimensional Democracy: A Supply and Demand Theory of Representation in American Legislatures (Cambridge University Press, 2016), won the APSA’s Virginia Gray Book Award in 2017.
Harden credits his success to tight-knit relationships with fellow political scientists who study state legislatures and Notre Dame colleagues who challenge and inspire him further. Motivation for his research is often found from American politics scholars just down the hall, he said, David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Politics and director of the Democracy Initiative; professor and department chair Geoff Layman; professor Christina Wolbrecht; and Matthew Hall, the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies and director of the Rooney Democracy Institute.
“They've really given me inspiration to frame my work in a way that tackles big questions,” Harden said. “And they’ve challenged me to think about how my work could answer huge questions about what democracy needs to be healthy — in the U.S., or even beyond.”
Simple, yet revolutionary
To address questions surrounding legislative representation, Harden and congressional legislative scholar Rachel Porter, the Notre Dame du Lac Assistant Professor of Political Science, formed the Representation and Politics in Legislatures (RPL) Lab. Part of the Rooney Democracy Institute, the research group — comprised of Harden, Porter, professor James Curry, and several postdoctoral and graduate scholars — aims to advance the study of legislative institutions, legislators, and representation in the United States and beyond.
For Harden, the establishment of the lab offered an opportunity for organic collaboration on similar topics and fostered a sense of identity among researchers.
“It just puts some meaningful structure to graduate school for students, and for us faculty, it gives meaningful structure to our research,” Harden said. “It also kind of recreates that community that I grew up in, so to speak.”
In the spirit of that community, Harden and lab collaborators hold a pitch day at the start of every new semester, a brainstorming session in which research ideas are “thrown out to see what sticks.” For an idea to move forward, a subset of group members must be interested in pursuing it, it should be feasible to complete while current graduate students are at Notre Dame, and it should align with the group's skill set.
“I also want the lab members thinking about research that will make a big impact with experts, political practitioners, and even on public discourse about how legislative institutions play a role in the health of American democracy,” Harden said.
One of those ideas centered on whether state legislators were held accountable for supportive roles they played during the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. To identify the answer, the entire seven-member lab examined data sets ranging from legislators’ social media posts about election misinformation to those who formally signed a letter to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
What RPL researchers largely found was that legislators faced minimal accountability — only those who physically went to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were punished by voters, parties, and/or colleagues. Their findings led to the paper “The Consequences of Elite Action Against Elections,” which was published in the British Journal of Political Science.
“I can't imagine doing that paper by myself,” Harden said. “That paper has essentially four major analyses in it, all of which could have been one paper by themselves. There's no way I would have done all of those analyses as well as they're done on my own.”
But beyond his research success, Harden said what’s been most rewarding has been being a part of graduate students’ futures and fostering a community where organic collaboration occurs — something that his mentor Carsey, who passed away in 2018, would’ve appreciated.
“I have done a lot of my career without that sounding board, without that person who really kind of brought me up in the discipline,” Harden said. “That's hard because he and I were very close. So I'm really proud that I have created a community here that I know he would’ve loved.”
Harden’s forthcoming work on his solo project, “A Falsification Framework for Investigating Observed Covariate Balance,” has been slow, steady, and, admittedly, very frustrating for him. The paper, which develops methodological tools for evaluating data generated without controlled experiments, is currently in the revise-and-resubmit process.
“The process has felt so unnatural to me,” Harden said. “What I’ve found is that working collaboratively produces better work, and it’s a more enriching and engaging process if you do it in community.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on May 06, 2026.