Sarah AndersonAssistant Professor – Environmental Politics |
Department of Political Science
4510 Bren Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5131
Email: sanderson at 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.
Working Papers
- “Pivots and Policy: Testing Models of Appropriations.” Under Review
- “Revisiting Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress, 1947-2006” with Phil Habel. Under Review
- “The Green Machine: Environmental Voting and Constituent Interest in the House.”
- “Are We Missing Something? Assessing the Dimensionality of Interest Group Scores.”
- “Budget Incrementalism: Small Aggregation, Big Changes” with Laurel Harbridge.
Current Projects
- “Timing in the Outcomes of Appropriations Legislation” with Jonathan Woon.
- “Incrementalism in Congressional Decision-Making” with Laurel Harbridge.
Courses Taught
ESM 241 - Environmental Politics and Policy
The politics of environmental policymaking from agenda formation to the stages of implementation, assessment, and reforms. Emphasis on national and state level policymaking in the U.S. coupled with a consideration of interactions across levels of social organization and comparisons across socio-political systems.
ESM 243 - Environmental Policy Analysis
Developing and analyzing environmental policies involves balancing social, political, and economic considerations. Course covers this process, including problem identification, formation of alternative policy response, and methods of analyzing and selecting the most appropriate policy response, and effective communications of results to clients/policymakers.
ESM 595 - Survey Design and Environmental Public Opinion
Survey research has become an increasingly important part of society. Researchers and the news media use it to understand public opinion, policy analysts use it to predict responses to policy change, and all sorts of organizations, public and private, use it to understand their clients. This course will consider many aspects of survey research, both for those interested in collecting survey data and for those who anticipate using such data to make decisions. Using several existing surveys on environmental policy and attitudes, we will explore public opinion on the environment and learn tools to extract information from surveys. The course will consider issues of survey design, including sampling, questionnaire design, data collection and data processing. Then it will introduce students to the analysis of survey data and the reporting of results.
