Jacqueline Colao
PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley
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I am a PhD candidate in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where I study American politics.
My research centers on how electoral institutions shape congressional representation in the United States, the trade-offs involved in achieving representativeness, and the mechanisms by which these dynamics unfold. To this end, my dissertation examines voter knowledge and voting behavior in U.S. primary elections, in order to understand how nomination systems impact the broader democratic context in which they exist. I utilize an original panel dataset of 37,718 respondents and 9,152 House primary voters from 45 congressional districts in 10 states that I collected during the 2022 (two-wave panel) and 2024 (four-wave panel) election cycles. This dataset is the largest panel of U.S. House primary voters to date and opens new avenues for examining questions that have been empirically challenging until now. Through novel data collection, sophisticated survey methods, and expertise in causal inference, my work produces consequential insights relevant to congressional representation, polarization, political parties and interest groups, electoral politics, and primary reform.
I received my Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College, where I studied Philosophy and Government & Legal Studies, and was awarded the Richard E. Morgan Prize for Excellence in the Study of the Constitution and the Philip W. Cummings Philosophy Prize.
My research centers on how electoral institutions shape congressional representation in the United States, the trade-offs involved in achieving representativeness, and the mechanisms by which these dynamics unfold. To this end, my dissertation examines voter knowledge and voting behavior in U.S. primary elections, in order to understand how nomination systems impact the broader democratic context in which they exist. I utilize an original panel dataset of 37,718 respondents and 9,152 House primary voters from 45 congressional districts in 10 states that I collected during the 2022 (two-wave panel) and 2024 (four-wave panel) election cycles. This dataset is the largest panel of U.S. House primary voters to date and opens new avenues for examining questions that have been empirically challenging until now. Through novel data collection, sophisticated survey methods, and expertise in causal inference, my work produces consequential insights relevant to congressional representation, polarization, political parties and interest groups, electoral politics, and primary reform.
I received my Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College, where I studied Philosophy and Government & Legal Studies, and was awarded the Richard E. Morgan Prize for Excellence in the Study of the Constitution and the Philip W. Cummings Philosophy Prize.