Mellissa Meisels

Mellissa Meisels

Postdoc & Incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science

Welcome! I am a postdoctoral associate in the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale University. In July, I will join Yale’s Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at Vanderbilt University, where I was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Previously, I was a Democracy Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Rochester. I earned my B.A. in Political Science at UCLA.

My research centers on the U.S. Congress, money in politics, electoral campaigns, and political organizations. Much of this work investigates the strategic choices of candidates and financial contributors in congressional campaigns, with an emphasis on primary elections. In doing so, I employ original data, natural language processing, causal inference tools, experiments, and structural estimation of formal models.

 

Publications

Meisels, Mellissa. 2025. Strategic Campaign Attention to Abortion Before and After Dobbs. Conditionally accepted, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Paper

Abstract In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional protection of abortion rights established in Roe v. Wade. In doing so, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization moved status quo on abortion policy more into line with the Republican Party's stance. Subsequent research has documented the decision's impact on mass political behavior and opinion, yet less is known about its impact on the behavior of political elites. I provide new evidence on congressional candidates' strategic responses to the decision with original data on campaign platforms (N = 4,703) from election cycles before and after Dobbs. After the decision, Democrats became significantly more likely to campaign on abortion and to do so using unambiguous language, while Republicans increasingly obfuscated their positions on the issue. Pre-post-Dobbs change in partisan divergence in campaign attention to abortion was driven most strongly by candidates in states with abortion bans set to take effect upon overturning of Roe (i.e. trigger laws and/or pre-Roe laws). Importantly, these shifting patterns of campaign attention were not present in other issue domains, consistent with changes in attention to abortion being driven by Dobbs rather than other contemporaneous factors.

 

Meisels, Mellissa. 2025. Everything in Moderation? The Effect of Extremist Nominations on Individual and Corporate PAC Fundraising. FirstView, Political Science Research and Methods. Paper

Abstract Do ideologically extreme candidates enjoy fundraising advantages over more moderate candidates? Extant work documents a relationship between candidates' positions and campaign contributions subnationally and in donor surveys, yet identification challenges have hampered investigation in the congressional context. I employ a close primaries regression discontinuity design to examine how "as-if random" nominations of extreme versus moderate House candidates influence general election contributions from individual donors and corporate PACs from 1980 to 2020. Results at both the nominee and contributor levels demonstrate that corporate PACs financially penalize extremists while individual donors respond similarly to extreme and moderate candidates. These findings contribute to ongoing debates regarding the extent and nature of campaign contributors' role in congressional polarization.

 

Meisels, Mellissa, Joshua D. Clinton, and Gregory A. Huber. 2024. Giving to the Extreme? Experimental Evidence on Donor Response to Candidate and District Characteristics. British Journal of Political Science 54(3): 851–873. Paper LSE USPP Writeup Replication

Abstract How does candidate ideology affect donors' contribution decisions in U.S. House elections? Studies of donor motivations have struggled with confounding of candidate, donor, and district characteristics in observational data and the difficulty of assessing trade-offs in surveys. We investigate how these factors affect contribution decisions using experimental vignettes administered to 7,000 verified midterm donors. While ideological congruence influences donors' likelihood of contributing to a candidate, district competitiveness and opponent extremity are equally important. Moreover, the response to ideology is asymmetric and heterogeneous: donors penalize more moderate candidates five times more heavily than more extreme candidates, with the most extreme donors exhibiting the greatest preference for candidates even more extreme than themselves. Republicans also exhibit a greater relative preference for extremism than Democrats, although partisan differences are smaller than differences by donor extremism. Our findings suggest that strategic considerations matter, and donors incentivize candidate extremism even more than previously thought.

 

Papers

Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism (Revise and resubmit, Journal of Politics) Paper

Abstract The concept of candidate positioning is central to the study of U.S. elections, representation, and political behavior. Existing work, however, overwhelmingly relies on indirect measures which may not reflect candidates’ stated positions. I analyze foundational relationships between candidate positions and district partisanship, primary electoral success, and primary fundraising performance with existing approaches versus text scaling estimates based on an original collection of campaign platforms from House primary candidates' websites in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Directly measuring candidates' positions using campaign platforms leads to conclusions vastly different than those reached with existing measures. While platform-based measures suggest candidates are responsive to their districts, existing measures do not. Within district, however, existing measures show financial and electoral penalties to extremism in primaries, but platform-based measures show no such penalty. These findings have wide-ranging implications for a number of ongoing scholarly debates which involve congressional candidates' positions.

 

Campaign Agendas and Issue Group Strategy in Congressional Primaries (under review) Paper

Abstract Which candidates do issue PACs support in House primaries? Competing theories suggest a focus on either friendly incumbents or new potential allies, yet evaluating divergent predictions requires data on candidates’ agendas. I leverage original issue platform text from campaign websites, FEC receipts, and bill summaries to measure campaign attention, PAC funding, and legislative activity across nine major issue areas from 2016 to 2022. I use various within–candidate research designs to show that candidates who prioritize an issue raise more money from PACs related to the issue, and these “issue champions” enjoy double the incumbency advantage in issue PAC fundraising compared to others — a difference not attributable to differences in subsequent legislative activity. These results illuminate the beginning of legislator–group relationships by providing new evidence that issue groups rely on campaign rhetoric in primaries to identify and foster connections with potential champions of their cause.

 

Competition and Free-Riding in Electoral Campaigns with Outside Spending (with Brenton Kenkel)