At the 35th annual meeting of the Society for Political Methodology, 2018 UNC PhD Kelsey Shoub, now a post-doctoral fellow at The University of Virginia, won the award for the best applied methods poster, from over 100 presenters. Her presentation, “How Changing Frame Sets Alters Legislative Outcomes in Congress” was based on her dissertation, which she defended in May 2018. Kelsey developed a dynamic algorithm to identify the number of arguments (or frames) used in congressional debates on all bills across recent years, and was able to predict the likelihood of policy change based on change in the set of arguments (frames) presented by the legislators as they debated the bills, before final action.
Kelsey has also recently co-authored a book with Frank Baumgartner and Derek Epp (PhD, 2015, now assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin), Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
In July 2018, Kelsey started a post-doctoral fellowship with the Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint program of Vanderbilt University and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She will be working on publications with Center directors Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman as well as working on revisions of her dissertation for publication as a book.