About

Zachary Albert is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His main focus is on the study of American politics, with particular emphasis on political parties, elections, and public policy. His current research examines various aspects of party organization and behavior, focusing on the relationship between formal party organizations and informal or external party groups in elections and the development of public policy. He employs a variety of methods, including network analysis, textual analysis, and interviews. For more information, he maintains a personal website with links to his published work and ongoing research.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Political economy
• Humanities
• Law
• Finance
• Philosophy
• Business

Selected publications

• Small Donors in U.S. Politics: Myth and Reality  <div> (Chapter 4: Are Small Donor Fundraisers Better Legislators?)</div>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Insurgency in Republican Primaries

  2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Winning At All Costs? How Negative Partisanship Affects Voter Decision-Making

  Political Behavior · 2024-11-19 · 3 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want <i>by Seth J. Hill</i>

  Political Science Quarterly · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want Get access Seth J Hill. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022. 200 pp. $105.00. Zachary Albert Zachary Albert Brandeis University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad086, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad086 Published: 19 September 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Factional Conflict and Independent Expenditures in the 2018 Democratic House Primaries

  Congress & the Presidency · 2021 · 22 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political economy
  • Political Science

  The 2018 House of Representatives elections were a historic victory for the Democratic Party. As has been the case in past “wave” elections, however, this victory has posed the risk of factionalism within the party. In this paper we draw upon data on primary competition and independent spending to assess claims that Democratic primaries showed signs of emerging factional conflict within the party, and we compare Democratic primary competition to competition that emerged within the Republican Party during the early 2010s. We show that, despite arguments from progressive activists about reshaping the party, there was relatively little money spent in 2018 for primary challengers or for other primary candidates who ran against the party establishment. Most consequentially, the money that was spent came from groups with narrow issue concerns or with concerns about descriptive representation, not from insurgent ideological groups. Democrats, then, might develop a “primary problem” that resembles the one faced by Republicans in prior election cycles, but there is little evidence that the 2018 primaries were the beginning of such a development.

  PublisherDOI

• Small Donors in US Elections

  Politique américaine · 2021 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Humanities
  • Political Science

  Le nombre d’électeurs contribuant aux campagnes électorales par de petits dons (« small donors » ou « petits donateurs ») connaît une nette augmentation ces dernières années. Cette tendance indique-t-elle une démocratisation de la vie politique ? En effet, la mobilisation d’une plus large base de citoyens pourrait contrebalancer l’influence des plus riches et des entreprises injectant des sommes considérables dans les partis politiques. Très peu de recherches nous renseignent quant aux effets d’un système de financement incitant les « petits dons » sur la vie politique de manière plus large. Sur la base de données descriptives, cet article formule quelques hypothèses dialoguant avec les théories établies sur le comportement politique des individus et des organisations. Notre argument principal insiste sur l’importance de relier les incitations aux petits dons avec le jeu des institutions et les dynamiques du système électoral. Nos résultats confirment que les petits donateurs sont plutôt représentatifs du corps électoral du point de vue de la proportion relative d’hommes et de femmes. Une réduction de l’écart en termes de représentativité des revenus est également à noter, bien que les petits donateurs aient des revenus supérieurs au revenu médian. Du point de vue idéologique, nous observons par ailleurs que les petits donateurs tiennent des positions plus radicales, et que par conséquent ils tendent à offrir leurs contributions aux candidats se rapprochant des extrêmes. Cette tendance se traduit par un renforcement de la polarisation à différents niveaux de la vie politique (système partisan, recrutement des candidats, dynamique interne des partis, politiques publiques).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Who should decide the party’s nominee? Understanding public attitudes toward primary elections

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-04-14

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Data from 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), including original survey items, and R code for replication of figures and tables in the main text and supplemental appendix.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Partisan Policymaking in the Extended Party Network: The Case of Cap-and-Trade Regulations

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-04-14

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Original data and R code needed to recreate tables, figures, and analyses in main and supplemental texts.

  PublisherDOI

• corpus_workspace.RData

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

• PRQ_data_replication_code.R

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Raymond J. La Raja

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  11 shared

• Jesse H. Rhodes

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2 shared

• Mia Costa

  Dartmouth College

  1 shared

• Robert G. Boatright

  1 shared

• David J. Barney

  1 shared

• Bruce Desmarais

  Louisiana State University

  1 shared

Education

• Doctoral Student, Political Science

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2019