Recent Publications
Online Article
Grubbs, Morris, and Austin Trantham. 2022. "The value of contingent jobs for Ph.D.'s seeking the tenure track."
Carpe Careers (blog), Inside Higher Ed. November 7.
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Book Chapter
Trantham, Austin, Connor J.S. Sutton, Margaret Mary Ochner, and Jennifer E. Lamm. 2022. "A Limited Time Offer: Exploring Adjunct, Visiting, and Fixed-Term Positions." In Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond,
eds. Kevin G. Lorentz II, Daniel J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, Davin Phoenix, and J. Cherie Strachan. American Political Science Association.
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Refereed Journal Article
Bailey, Kendall L., and Austin Trantham. 2021. "Racial Politics and the Presidency: Analyzing White House Visits by
Professional Sports Teams." Social Science Quarterly 102(2): 897-919.
Recent Working Papers:
"Analyzing Congressional Reactions to the State of the Union Address." (with Kendall L. Bailey)
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One of the most polarized, politicized, and partisan events in Washington each year is the presidential State of the Union address. Speaking live to the nation from Capitol Hill, presidents use this annual message to simultaneously give a public oration, political statement, and policy pronouncement. Political scientists have extensively examined State of the Union messages, including its changing tonal nature and impact on issue salience by the public. In contrast, our research examines the internal political environment created during the message to better understand inter-branch partisan engagement in real time. While some forms of presidential rhetoric only allow for reactive responses because they must be read and analyzed, responses during the State of the Union address are instantaneously met with live positive or negative reactions from their main audience—current members of the House and Senate. This work broadens our understanding of presidential-congressional relations in real time by analyzing reactions to statements given in the State of the Union Address. We are additionally able to more specifically examine the immediate impact of partisanship and polarization in modern political discourse.
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"Oh, the Places They'll Go: A Geographic Analysis of Gubernatorial Campaigns." (with Ryan Voris)
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Political campaigns are a flurry of activity, with incumbents and challengers all. spending months on the campaign trail touting achievements and making promises. The candidate’s time is often the most valuable resource campaigns have to spend and decisions about where the candidate goes are efforts to curry electoral favor with voters. We would expect candidates to visit areas either filled with persuadable voters, to win over undecideds, or base voters, to turnout the vote, in an effort to win. Recent scholarship focuses on the geographic location of campaign events during presidential elections to provide a fuller understanding of the strategic choices made by candidates during the campaign. We extend this work to examine where state gubernatorial candidates go during the 2018 election season. Our focus is seventeen competitive races across the country where we construct an original dataset using the candidate’s social-media accounts. We then combine these travel patterns with county-level demographic and turnout data to see where in the state candidates are going. This work adds to our understanding of the strategic decisions made during political campaigns.
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