Marvin McNeese, Jr. is soon to earn his Ph.D. in Political Science from Rice University. His research interests include American politics, especially interest group activity across national and subnational political institutions. His dissertation focuses on the relative advantages provided to policy advocates by political venues—the institutional settings where policy decisions are made. Building on Baumgartner and Jones’ punctuated equilibrium theory, he tests whether where policy is made has an independent effect on likelihood of policy adoption. Punctuated equilibrium theory suggests that a change in policy requires an advocate to move decisionmaking to a new venue that is most advantageous to the advocate’s position. Marvin’s research seeks to explain the venue choices policy advocates make, whether those choices affect policy outcomes, and whether policy consensus among advocates is necessary for advancing policy change. He tests hypotheses with a re-analysis of Baumgartner et al. (2009) Lobbying and Policy Change data set. He also collects original data on the issue of hydraulic fracturing for testing his consensus hypothesis, which involved a machine aided content analysis of 20 national and regional newspapers’ coverage of hydraulic fracturing between 2008-2013.
Marvin has solo-taught American politics courses as well as an undergraduate statistics and research design course. He has also taught courses completely in Spanish, and maintains an interest in Latin American politics.
Before Rice, Marvin studied political science and economics at Albion College in Michigan, and completed Masters programs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Teresa Lorenzo Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
