Connor Halloran Phillips
Assistant Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology
Bio
Connor Halloran Phillips is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology (CMIST), offering courses on American politics. His research examines interest groups, parties, legislatures, and elections in the US with a focus on how federalism shapes phenomena such as partisan polarization and voter participation. In his current work, Dr. Phillips analyzes interest groups’ campaign contributions and ratings of state legislators to understand the strategies groups adopt in engaging with politics and to assess their role in promoting polarization at the state level. Beyond this project, some of his other research explores the impact of state and local electoral rules on party registration and turnout as well as how growing extremism in state legislatures influences the ideological positions of candidates for Congress.
Dr. Phillips was born in Pittsburgh and attended Duke University, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science. Before joining CMU, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and served as a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University. He is an affiliate of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which seeks to measure and improve legislative effectiveness in Congress and state legislatures.