Meet the FAS faculty: Mellissa Meisels

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For political scientist Mellissa Meisels, congressional primaries are like a show she can’t turn off.  

As a child, she eagerly tracked congressional elections near her hometown. Now, as a member of Yale’s faculty, she gets to advance her research alongside other top scholars in the field.

Currently a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Center for the Study of American Politics, this summer Meisels will become Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Prior to Yale, Meisels served as a Democracy Center Visiting Scholar at the University of Rochester in March of 2023.

For years, Meisels has documented trends in each election cycle and searched for new patterns in her ever-growing collection of data. The next chapter of her academic work analyzes electoral campaigns and financial contributions, allowing Meisels to follow the flows of money that shape US politics.  

“I'm especially interested in how congressional candidates publicly present their positions and issue priorities, and how different types of moneyed interests—interest groups, donors, and activists—respond,” Meisels explained. “I focus on both sides of this relationship: candidates' strategies in self-presentation, as well as financial interests’ contribution strategies, and the implications of both for representation and democracy.”  

As she works to understand the effects of money and campaigns on our politics, Meisels is drawing upon myriad resources: a dataset she began collecting as an undergraduate, years of research experience, and new connections with colleagues in the department of Political Science who share her research interests.

Documenting election trends with data

While Meisels has always loved elections, her first undergraduate political science class at UCLA proved that her original plan to become a lawyer wasn't the only option for immersing herself in politics. “That class was the first time I realized that being a professor and doing political science for the rest of my life was a potential career option,” Meisels recalled of the 2016 course. “It was a really exciting time to take a class about American politics. I just ate up every single lecture. I loved it even more than I thought I would.”

Meisels then began conducting undergraduate research that culminated in a senior thesis examining the sociopolitical dynamics of the 2014 House primary elections. Her hand-coding of local newspaper articles about those elections provided valuable research experience as she continued her academic trajectory at Vanderbilt University, where she earned both her MA and PhD in political science. There she expanded upon her dataset by collecting and systematically analyzing campaign platforms from websites of the thousands of candidates who ran in House primaries from 2016 to 2024.  

Meisels’s large-scale data collection efforts make it easier to measure candidates’ ideological positions and issue priorities based on their own words, compared to existing indirect approaches. “In political science prior to this, if we were interested in where a candidate is ideologically, we had these existing measures that aren't based directly on what the candidate says,” she said. “These measures were based on more readily available sources of data, like where candidates get their contributions from, or mediated accounts of campaigns from news articles.”

The data—which encompasses a total of five election cycles and took over five years to collect—enabled Meisels to both create a “unidimensional measure” of how conservative or liberal a candidate is and identify their issue priorities based on textual analyses of their campaign platforms. From there, she combines the campaign platform information with a cataloguing of their electoral and fundraising performance, incumbency status, and characteristics of their district and election.  

New horizons

As Meisels settles into life at Yale, she’s keen to explore new research topics and build lasting collaborations. One strand of her current research revolves around analyzing campaign contributions from various types of donors, inspired by the public perception that our politics are heavily shaped by money.

Meisels is interested in investigating whether this perception—driven largely by the 2010 Supreme Court decision “Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission,” which ruled that any laws restricting corporations’ political spending violated the First amendment—can be borne out with evidence.

“It's actually extremely difficult to identify how or whether money is changing our politics compared to how our politics would be without money,” Meisels said. “A lot of my work is trying to more carefully consider how financial contributors are responding to choices that other actors, like candidates, are making, rather than necessarily trying to change and influence those dynamics themselves.”

While new to the political science department, she has been quick to forge new academic partnerships. Last year Meisels co-authored a study with Gregory Huber, Forst Family Professor of Political Science, in the British Journal of Political Science that examined how candidate ideology affects donors' contribution decisions.  

She also looks forward to collaborating with departmental peers like Joshua Kalla, Associate Professor of Political Science, as well as junior faculty members like Kevin DeLuca and Shiro Kuriwaki, who share her interests in how money and campaign dynamics influence politics and congressional representation.

“It's incredible to be in a department with people that are at such similar career stages to me and who have such similar research interests,” she said. “Even aside from formal collaboration and co-authorship, just having them in the department and being able to present my research in progress at workshops and get their feedback will inevitably improve my work, in every aspect.”

Academic drive and vigor aren’t exclusive to the faculty. Meisels is enthusiastic about beginning to teach next semester, and Yale students' proclivity to pursue hands-on research is especially thrilling.

“I feel that so many Yale College students, as well as pre-doctoral fellows and other people at Yale, are really interested in getting involved in the research process,” she said.

“I'm really looking forward to getting to know students and seeing if they're interested in getting involved in my research. So many of my colleagues in the department are working with incredible undergrads and pre-doctoral fellows, and there's such a vibrant community at Yale of people that are interested in research.”

In the fall, Meisels will be offering a new undergraduate lecture: Special Interest Politics in the US. The course will cover recent changes in the campaign finance environment, the motivations of different types of special interests, including political parties, individual donors, interest groups, corporations, and unions. Students will analyze their organizational structures (PACs, Super PACs, and “dark money” groups, for example) and tools they employ, such as campaign contributions, independent expenditures, and lobbying. Next spring, she will offer a new undergraduate seminar on political elite behavior in congressional elections.

As she prepares to welcome a new wave of undergraduates, Meisels will continue the exhausting but worthwhile collection of data on campaign platforms.  

“Those are the things that get me really excited and thinking about the next research papers that I want to write. If there's a question that keeps popping up in my mind and I have this super unique data to be able to answer it, it makes my job so exciting every day.”