{"id":48,"date":"2021-03-17T18:58:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-17T18:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/?page_id=48"},"modified":"2025-12-04T12:37:22","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T12:37:22","slug":"research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/research\/","title":{"rendered":"Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Community \u2013 Constitutionalism \u2013 Capacity<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>That\u2019s it, in a nutshell.<\/strong> How do people, living and associating in particular communities, interpret political authority? How do constitutional structures channel those interpretations into collective action? And how does the uneven capacity of governments and communities shape the possibilities for liberal self-governance? My work brings together political development, federalism, and political geography to explain how spatially rooted communities understand politics, how constitutional arrangements structure power, and how the geography of civic capacity conditions democratic life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Community<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Community is where liberalism meets its limits and possibilities. While liberal theory centers the autonomous individual, citizens interpret politics through the social, economic, and geographic contexts that structure their lives. My work examines how <em>place<\/em>\u2014rural, sectional, and post-industrial alike\u2014shapes political meaning. Rural communities serve as analytically revealing cases because the tensions between liberal individualism and local interdependence are particularly visible: distance, thin state presence, and shared economic vulnerability sharpen the interpretive frameworks citizens use to judge authority. Across survey research, experimental methods, and long-term data collection, I study how communities of all kinds become <strong>interpretive environments<\/strong> that filter national politics, shape expectations of government, and condition how people understand democratic responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Constitutionalism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Constitutionalism defines the institutional channels through which these community-grounded interpretations of politics are acted upon. My research traces how federalism, parties, and the administrative state form a constitutional political economy &#8211; one that disperses authority in theory but increasingly centralizes it in practice. Using historical institutional analysis and archival methods, I show how nationalized parties and executive-centered governance have transformed federalism from a system enabling local self-rule into a mechanism of presidential consolidation. I call this process <strong>presidential federalism<\/strong>, a developmental pathway through which national political incentives reshape the constitutional order and narrow the institutional pluralism that liberal self-governance requires. This work links community-level experience to the macro-constitutional structures that organize American political life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Capacity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Capacity is the bridge between community and constitutionalism: the political-economic dimension that determines what governments and communities can actually achieve. My research examines how variations in administrative reach, fiscal resources, and civic infrastructure shape the lived experience of the state. These disparities in capacity help explain why some places experience national policies as responsive and enabling, while others experience them as distant, slow, or misaligned with local conditions. Capacity, in this sense, is not simply an administrative variable; it is a constitutional one. It conditions the practical meaning of federalism, affects whether communities can exercise forms of self-governance, and influences whether citizens view government as legitimate or neglectful. Understanding capacity reveals how political economy and institutional design combine to produce uneven democratic outcomes across space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Community \u2013 Constitutionalism \u2013 Capacity That\u2019s it, in a nutshell. How do people, living and associating in particular communities, interpret political authority? How do constitutional structures channel those interpretations into collective action? And how does the uneven capacity of governments and communities shape the possibilities for liberal self-governance? My work brings together political development, federalism, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10236,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10236"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":347,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/48\/revisions\/347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/nfjacobs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}