Ryan Bookstein headshot

Ryan Bookstein

PhD Student • Department of Government and Politics • University of Maryland

I am a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. My research investigates how capacity constraints shape the behavior of elites in American political institutions. I also study the use of large language models in social science research.

At UMD, I teach courses on quantitative methodology and data science.

Publications

  1. Party Defection in Senate Confirmations of Executive Nominees (with Kris Miler). 2026. Congress & the Presidency.

    Legislative-executive relations are generally portrayed as partisan and combative. The conventional wisdom is that Senate confirmation votes follow party lines, but the reality is different. Based on an original dataset of nearly 500 presidential nominations to executive agencies from 2017–2024, we find that the vote follows the party line only 12% of the time, and the majority of the time, ten or more senators defect from their party’s position. We examine the factors that explain the extent of party defection, focusing on the role of electoral timing, the position to which the individual is nominated, and the nominees themselves. We find that party defection is more likely when nominees are not seen as being ideological or partisan, and when the position is of higher status or in an agency perceived as less ideological. These findings reveal overlooked bipartisan dynamics due to the expectation that all politics is partisan.

Working Papers

  1. “The Geography of Senate Constituency Service: Field Office Siting, Accessibility, and Persistence” (with James Gimpel).
  2. “Deference or Discipline?: Party Defection and Senator Behavior on Executive Nominations” (with Kris Miler).
  3. “Committees as Vehicles for Issue-Specific Lawmaking Effectiveness.”
  4. “Informal Constituencies: Neighboring Legislators in Congress” (with Landon Blacknall).
  5. “Who Serves the President? A Historical Dataset of American Cabinet Members, 1789–2026” (with Matthew Zinno).

Works in Progress

  1. “The Political Economy of the Congressional Staff Labor Market.”
  2. “Beyond the Office Door: How Legislators Allocate Staff Across Their Constituencies” (with James Gimpel).
  3. “Legislative Staff and Issue Portfolios in the U.S. Congress” (with Kris Miler).
  4. “A Demand-Side Perspective to Constituent Representation” (with Gideon Ondap).

Teaching

  1. GVPT 622: Quantitative Methods for Political Science (Fall 2026) — Content
  2. Introduction to Data Science (Summer 2026) — Content