Michael Auslen

Assistant Professor
Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
mauslen@austin.utexas.edu

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My research focuses on democratic representation, the media, and public opinion's role in policymaking, with an emphasis on state and local politics. I am particularly interested in understanding how actors such as local news organizations and political parties enhance or weaken the links between the public and elected representatives. I also study political methodology, in particular methods for public opinion estimation.

I received my PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. I also earned an MPP from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a BA in Journalism and Political Science from Indiana University. Previously, I worked as a journalist covering state and local politics for the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald, and Indianapolis Star.

Publications

  1. The Culture War and Partisan Polarization: State Political Parties, 1960-2018 (with Gerald Gamm, Justin H. Phillips, and Matthew Carr). 2024. Studies in American Political Development 38(2):117-37.
    [Publisher's version] [Preprint]
    2. Abstract Partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of contemporary American politics. This was not always the case; for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, social issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights played no role in politics. Where and when did the partisan divide begin? Did the initiative come from state or national parties? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? We have constructed an original database of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1960 to 2018. These platforms allow us to trace position-taking on these issues and generate estimates of platform ideology. By the time national parties took positions, we show, they lagged state-level position-taking. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we show that state party system polarization did not occur around any critical moment but rather was incremental.
  2. Improving Subnational Opinion Estimation from Cluster-Sampled Polls. 2024. State Politics and Policy Quarterly 24(4):447-67.
    [Publisher's version] [Preprint] [Appendix] [Replication data]
    3. Abstract

    – Best Graduate Student Poster, 2022 State Politics and Policy Conference

    The development of multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) has allowed scholars to more accurately estimate subnational public opinion using national polls. However, MRP generally recovers less accurate estimates from polls whose respondents are selected using cluster sampling – also called area-probability sampling. This is in part because cluster-sampled polls rely on a complex form of random sampling focused on national representativeness that may result in small or unrepresentative subsamples in subnational geographies. This has limited MRP’s usefulness in subnational opinion estimation in several contexts, including historical polls in the US, where cluster-sampling was common into the 1980s, and large academic studies in many countries today. In this paper, I propose two approaches to improve estimation from MRP with cluster-sampled polls. The first is pooling data from multiple surveys to produce a larger sample of clusters. The second is clustered MRP (CMRP), which extends MRP by modeling opinion using the geographic information included in a survey’s cluster-sampling procedure. Using simulations, I show that both methods improve upon traditional MRP, and I validate them using historical polls in the US.

  3. Divided by Income? Policy Preferences of the Rich and Poor within the Democratic and Republican Parties (with Justin H. Phillips). 2024. Political Behavior 46:2473-95.
    [Publisher's version] [Preprint] [Appendix] [Replication data]
    4. Abstract Research consistently demonstrates that differences between the policy preferences of high- and low-income individuals are surprisingly small, at least at the aggregate level. We depart from this work by considering the size of income-based differences in opinion within political parties. To do so, we use responses to 144 policy-specific questions in the 2010-2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Our effort demonstrates that differences in opinion among the rich and poor tend to be larger within the parties than in the overall population. Interestingly, these gaps are largest among Democrats. We find that these larger gaps persist even after accounting for the party’s racial and ethnic diversity. Furthermore, among Democrats, classbased gaps in opinion are larger than the gaps we observe among other potential intraparty cleavages, such as age, gender, and religiosity. Our results suggest important implications for the growing literature on representational inequality.

Working Papers and Works in Progress

Other Published Writing

Book Review

Teaching

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