Research Projects
While the NIU Master's of Public Administration is primarily an experience based master's program, comparative research is core to Public Administration both as a field of scientific inquiry and as an area of practice. While at my internship with the Village of Lake Villa, I regularly conduct comparative analysis for evaluate various policy proposals, this page will outline my academic research projects.
I am currently pondering two major research topics within the field of public administration: The effect of universities on quality of representation and the policy proliferation process of novel policies and contexts.
The motivating observation for investigating the role of universities on the quality of representation in local government is that college students fill a unique socioeconomic role. College students are generally low income renters, something traditionally disliked by landed residents, but provide massive economic and social benefits to landed long term residents. The core of the current iteration of this paper is the creation of a game theoretic formal model, analyzing actors and their incentives to identify potential mechanisms effecting electoral politics and thus representation.
The motivating observation for investigating the method by which unique policies proliferate or policies proliferate to unique contexts is a simple extension of the traditional policy proliferation process: Well resourced municipalities (urban centers) identify emerging issues and iterate upon a policy solution until the legal and policy regime stabilizes, at that point surrounding municipalities (suburban areas) adopt the established policy framework with changes to the policy implementation itself since the context and thus expression of the public issue differs. However, what happens when a municipality finds itself in a unique context with a relatively unique public issue? Such a municipality attempt to find another municipality in a similarly novel context or optimize for public issue similarity?