Speaker:  Charles R. Shipan is a Visiting Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.  He is also the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science and the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, Shipan served on the faculty at the University of Iowa and held positions as a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College in Dublin.  Shipan is the author of two books, Designing Judicial Review and Deliberate Discretion? (coauthored with John Huber) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on political institutions and public policy. He is currently engaged in several large scale projects, including bipartisanship in the US, the diffusion of antismoking laws, and the duration of laws. 

Paper Title:  Bipartisanship and Public Policy in the United States
Paper Abstract:  Politicians, journalists, and other political observers in the United States regularly emphasize the need for Congress to act in a bipartisan manner.  Yet the precise meaning of bipartisanship is usually left unclear, and we have at best anecdotal evidence regarding its presumably positive effects.  In this project I identify claims made about the effects of bipartisanship and systematically analyze whether bipartisanship has the sorts of positive influence on public policy that its proponents claim.