Sarah Anderson

Assistant Professor – Environmental Politics

Curriculum Vita

Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and

Department of Political Science

4510 Bren Hall

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131

Email: sanderson@bren.ucsb.edu

Phone: 805-893-5886
Fax: 805-893-7612

Biography

Sarah Anderson arrived at the Bren School in 2007, bringing valuable expertise in political structures and dynamics, which profoundly influence environmental policy. She is also affiliated with the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include legislatures, political parties, public policy, statistical methods, and environmental politics. Those interests are reflected in her experience in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a U.S. congressman’s legislative assistant and also researched legislation to brief members of the House National Parks and Public Lands Subcommittee. Her current projects include an extension of her dissertation work, in which she analyzed (and found serious limitations to) the three main models for predicting government spending at the level of appropriations bills. In other projects, she is working to quantify the impact of environmentally concerned constituents on congressional voting, and seeking to determine the degree to which environmental voting, agricultural voting, and voting in other policy areas reflect more general voting in Congress. In addition to a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, she holds an M.S. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.S. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Publications

“The Political Economy of Wildfire Management: Saving Forests, Saving Houses, or Burning Money” with Terry L. Anderson. Forthcoming. In Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives. Edited by Karen M. Bradshaw and Dean Lueck. RFF Press.

“Complex Constituencies: Intense Environmentalists and Representation.” 2011. Environmental Politics 20(4): 547-565.

“Incrementalism in Appropriations: Small Aggregation, Big Changes” with Laurel Harbridge. 2010. Public Administration Review 70(3): 464-474.

“Revisiting Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress, 1947-2007” with Phil Habel. 2008. Political Analysis 17: 83-88. doi: 10.1093/pan/mpn015.

Working Papers

“Pivots and Bills: Testing Models of Appropriations.”

“Are We Missing Something? Assessing the Dimensionality of Interest Group Scores.”

“Political Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional Appropriations” with Jonathan Woon. Appendix.

Current Projects

“Delaying the Buck: Timing, Uncertainty, and Appropriations Outcomes” with Jonathan Woon.

“Playing with Dice: Political Economy of Natural Disasters in the United States, 1988-2008” with Jaime Sainz

“To Cut or Not to Cut: Spending Dynamics and Bargaining in Congress” with Laurel Harbridge

Data

Adjusted ADA Scores, 1947-2007 (4.4 MB)

The Excel file includes nominal and adjusted ADA scores for each member of Congress from 1947-2007. The file also includes annual nominal and adjusted chamber means and medians. Adjusted ADA scores were estimated by Sarah Anderson and Philip Habel using the method introduced by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder, "Comparing Interest Groups Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress" American Political Science Review 93: 33-50.

Citation: Anderson, Sarah and Philip Habel. "Revisiting Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress, 1947–2007." Political Analysis 2008. doi:10.1093/pan/mpn015

Courses

Number	Title
241	Environmental Politics and Policy
243	Environmental Policy Analysis
269	Survey Design and Environmental Public Opinion
595II	Congressional Decision-making and the Environment