Erik S. Herron

Associate Professor, Political Science

Department of Political Science

Contact Information

Office phone number(s): (785) 864-9027
Office: 310 Blake Hall
Office Hours: On leave
Personal Web Page: http://people.ku.edu/~eherron
Email Address: eherron@ku.edu

Mailing Address:	1541 Lilac Lane, 504 Blake Hall
	Department of Political Science - KU
	Lawrence, KS 66044-3177
	USA

Background

Educational Background
Graduated from: Michigan State University, Ph.D., Political Science, 2000
Indiana University, M.A., Russian and East European Studies, 1992
University of Michigan, B.A., Russian and East European Studies, 1990
First Appointed at KU: 2001

Research Statement:

My research agenda focuses on political institutions and their effects.  Most of my publications emphasize how election rules influence the incentives facing political actors and analyze how these incentives affect behavior.  While the subjects of my empirical work tend to be in post-communist Europe and Eurasia, I strive to characterize my research as generalizable beyond the specific cases under study. 

A major component of my research agenda has been the study of mixed electoral systems.  This work challenged the dominant approach to studying mixed systems both theoretically and empirically. The extant literature implicitly treated the two tiers of mixed systems as independent, suggesting that Duvergerian equilibria should prevail.  Standard research designs reflected these assumptions as scholars used a “controlled comparison” to evaluate the effects of constituencies and party list systems.

Along with colleagues, I proposed that “contamination,” or interaction, likely influenced the incentives that mixed systems provided to voters, parties, and other political actors.  Initial work established empirically that “contamination” effects seemed to be in play.  Other scholars engaged in a debate, and a literature developed to adjudicate this issue.  My research has been used extensively in the debate, with 269 citations (Google Scholar, April 2011) for my work on mixed systems alone. The entire corpus of my work has received just under 450 citations.

Over time, my views about the substantive effects of “contamination” evolved.  My co-authored book (Mixed Electoral Systems: Contamination and its Consequences, 2005) with Federico Ferrara (a former graduate student at KU) and Misa Nishikawa (a long-time colleague on the research) sketched out a fuller view of how contamination might influence strategic decision-making.  It provided a more nuanced argument, acknowledging that the substantive effects of contamination could be small (and that the effects could vary based on the institutional characteristics of the mixed systems themselves).

After the book’s publication in late 2005, I continued to engage in research related to mixed systems, although the theoretical focus changed.  My 2007 article in the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics addressed electoral system choice, and how Ukraine’s decision to abandon the mixed system was nested in debates about constitutional reform.  In 2007-2008, I joined a team of researchers applying for support from the National Science Foundation to investigate party personnel decision-making, especially in mixed electoral systems.  The research was funded for three years; we are completing data collection and moving into the analytical phase.  I anticipate that these data will allow me to further contribute to the study of mixed electoral systems and their effects.

As I completed the book on mixed electoral systems, I also began working on several projects that provided a bridge between the research on mixed systems and another growing theoretical interest - political accountability.  Scholars interested in democratization processes have increasingly directed attention to mechanisms of vertical accountability (e.g., elections) and horizontal accountability (e.g., parliamentary questions) to better understand how they function in established and transitional democratic societies.  Questions about how voters and political actors use institutional tools to exert oversight and accountability functions form the core of my emerging research agenda.

The first project related to this theoretical interest was a new manuscript analyzing elections in post-Soviet societies.  In the book Elections and Democracy After Communism? (2009), I compared expectations of behavior that emanate from the general literature on comparative politics and area studies.  I explored the electoral process in post-Soviet space and interpreted my findings through the lens of both approaches.  The book demonstrates how the general electoral studies literature provides powerful explanations, but that understanding regional nuances may be necessary to fully interpret outcomes. 

The research I conducted to compose the book manuscript provided me insights into how under-studied elements of the voting process (e.g., electoral management bodies) directly influence elections as tools permitting voters to hold officials accountable.  I have explored the effects of passive observation on electoral processes (Electoral Studies 2010); how election fraud may affect election returns (a book chapter published in 2008, parts of the 2009 book, East European Politics and Societies 2011, and Comparative Political Studies 2012); how legislators use parliamentary questions (papers presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference (2009, 2010, 2011) and the American Political Science Association Conference (2010)), and how parties make personnel decisions (NSF project, see above). These interests will sustain my research agenda in the foreseeable future.