Ursula Hackett
Biographic Data
| ID | 369213 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ursula Hackett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ursula |
| FAMILY NAME | Hackett |
| SIGNATURE | HACKETT U |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1768-9006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Dilutive Drift: The Racial Impact of Low-Change Redistricting
As America’s racial composition shifts, states that minimize changes to existing districts in successive redistricting cycles can entrench racial disparities in representation, a process I term dilutive drift. Using novel spatial measures of US House district change between successive congresses, I show that packing and cracking can occur passively, and not only through deliberate gerrymandering. States with long histories of racial exclusion, su…
District Protectionism: Public Opinion on Race, Partisanship, and Redistricting Change
What do people value in redistricting? This paper presents three original survey experiments to examine public attitudes toward redistricting, including partisan gerrymandering, majority-minority districts, and traditional criteria such as compactness and contiguity. The experiments reveal an orientation I term 'district protectionism': a preference for minimal changes to existing districts, even when retaining current boundaries preserves partis…
Redrawing Democracy: Quantifying House District Continuity and Change, 1789–2024
How have U.S. House districts changed since the Founding? When do mapmakers reshape districts—and when do they choose to preserve them? This article introduces the concept of “spatial protectionism”—the strategic minimization of district change—and develops four original measures to analyze redistricting changes from 1789 onward. I demonstrate how the strategic imperatives, racial context, and technical capabilities of mapmakers shape the magnitu…
Litigating Policy Drift: Frozen Categories and Thresholds in Court
The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases enco…
Rethinking America's racial policy alliances: Beyond 'Repair' and 'Protect
Electoral Accountability for Rising Tuition in the US: Evidence from a Survey Experiment and Observational Data
Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students' well-being.While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood.In this article, we focus on electoral accountability that policy makers face for rising tuition by examining vo…
The Reinvention of Vouchers for a Color-Blind Era: A Racial Orders Account
Historically, vouchers, which provide a sum of money to parents for private education, were tools of racist oppression; but in recent decades some advocates claim them as “the civil rights issue of our time.” This article brings an analytic-historical perspective rooted in racial orders to understand how education vouchers have been reincarnated and reinvented since the Jim Crow era. Combining original primary research with statistical analysis, …
Attenuated Governance: How Policymakers Insulate Private School Choice from Legal Challenge
Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communi…
Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States
In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states an…
Trump's 100 days: Foreign Policy and Security Implications - Introduction
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Studies on Security on 25 July 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21624887.2017.1355153\n\n‘I think the 100 days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful,’ Trump (2017) declared in an April 2017 interview. Yet candidate Trump (2016) had also issued a ‘100 day action plan to Make America Great Again’. The first ‘…
The Six Great Societies
“The Great Society” denotes, variously: a slogan or shorthand, a utopia, a means, an end, an era, and a set of normative claims. This article tracks the changing meanings of The Great Society in order to clarify and formalize scholarly claims about the Johnson administration. Employing Edward Sapir's conception of “condensation symbols” and Keith Donnellan's distinction between “referential” and “attributive” descriptions, I create a typology of …
Symposium Introduction: The Politics of Religious Alliances
This symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these articles instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do — and do not — form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multi-denomination…
The Exit-Voice Choice: Religious Cleavages, Public Aid, and America's Private Schools
In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by…
The Goldilocks principle: Applying the exclusive disjunction to fuzzy sets
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), a technique by which the tools of Boolean algebra are applied to equifinal causal conditions, is gaining popularity amongst scholars. This paper draws upon a distinction largely overlooked by the QCA literature: the difference between inclusive- and exclusive-or (OR and XOR). I argue that XOR should be included amongst the tools of QCA, explain why XOR is more easily applied to crisp- than fuzzy-set QCA, an…
Republicans, Catholics and the West: Explaining the Strength of Religious School Aid Prohibitions
In the current polarized political climate there is heightened attention paid to the American state constitutional provisions known as “Blaine Amendments” or “No-Aid Provisions” that were passed between 1835 and 1959 to prohibit public aid to religious schools. Judgments about No-Aid Provisions have largely been made by scholars on anad hocbasis using narrative-based historical accounts, emotive language and without clear classificatory criteria.…
Attenuated Governance: How Policymakers Insulate Private School Choice from Legal Challenge
Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communi…
Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States
In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states an…
The Reinvention of Vouchers for a Color-Blind Era: A Racial Orders Account
Historically, vouchers, which provide a sum of money to parents for private education, were tools of racist oppression; but in recent decades some advocates claim them as “the civil rights issue of our time.” This article brings an analytic-historical perspective rooted in racial orders to understand how education vouchers have been reincarnated and reinvented since the Jim Crow era. Combining original primary research with statistical analysis, …
Litigating Policy Drift: Frozen Categories and Thresholds in Court
The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases enco…
Republicans, Catholics and the West: Explaining the Strength of Religious School Aid Prohibitions
In the current polarized political climate there is heightened attention paid to the American state constitutional provisions known as “Blaine Amendments” or “No-Aid Provisions” that were passed between 1835 and 1959 to prohibit public aid to religious schools. Judgments about No-Aid Provisions have largely been made by scholars on anad hocbasis using narrative-based historical accounts, emotive language and without clear classificatory criteria.…
Redrawing Democracy: Quantifying House District Continuity and Change, 1789–2024
How have U.S. House districts changed since the Founding? When do mapmakers reshape districts—and when do they choose to preserve them? This article introduces the concept of “spatial protectionism”—the strategic minimization of district change—and develops four original measures to analyze redistricting changes from 1789 onward. I demonstrate how the strategic imperatives, racial context, and technical capabilities of mapmakers shape the magnitu…
Rethinking America's racial policy alliances: Beyond 'Repair' and 'Protect
Trump's 100 days: Foreign Policy and Security Implications - Introduction
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Studies on Security on 25 July 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21624887.2017.1355153\n\n‘I think the 100 days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful,’ Trump (2017) declared in an April 2017 interview. Yet candidate Trump (2016) had also issued a ‘100 day action plan to Make America Great Again’. The first ‘…
The Exit-Voice Choice: Religious Cleavages, Public Aid, and America's Private Schools
In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by…
Republicans, Catholics and the West: Explaining the Strength of Religious School Aid Prohibitions
In the current polarized political climate there is heightened attention paid to the American state constitutional provisions known as “Blaine Amendments” or “No-Aid Provisions” that were passed between 1835 and 1959 to prohibit public aid to religious schools. Judgments about No-Aid Provisions have largely been made by scholars on anad hocbasis using narrative-based historical accounts, emotive language and without clear classificatory criteria.…
The Goldilocks principle: Applying the exclusive disjunction to fuzzy sets
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), a technique by which the tools of Boolean algebra are applied to equifinal causal conditions, is gaining popularity amongst scholars. This paper draws upon a distinction largely overlooked by the QCA literature: the difference between inclusive- and exclusive-or (OR and XOR). I argue that XOR should be included amongst the tools of QCA, explain why XOR is more easily applied to crisp- than fuzzy-set QCA, an…
The Six Great Societies
“The Great Society” denotes, variously: a slogan or shorthand, a utopia, a means, an end, an era, and a set of normative claims. This article tracks the changing meanings of The Great Society in order to clarify and formalize scholarly claims about the Johnson administration. Employing Edward Sapir's conception of “condensation symbols” and Keith Donnellan's distinction between “referential” and “attributive” descriptions, I create a typology of …
Symposium Introduction: The Politics of Religious Alliances
This symposium examines the politics of religious alliances. While the literature on religion and politics generally focuses on differences across individuals, congregations, denominations, or traditions, these articles instead ask how, when, and why religious groups do — and do not — form alliances with other organizations, both religious and secular. Specifically, this collection of original research examines the formation of multi-denomination…
The Exit-Voice Choice: Religious Cleavages, Public Aid, and America's Private Schools
In America's culture wars denominations increasingly ally with one another despite differences in theology, church organization, and membership. But these developments are not reflected in America's private K-12 school system or in patterns of public aid for children who attend them where divisions between religious traditions remain stark. I demonstrate, by means of an analysis of critical junctures in American political development supported by…
Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States
In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states an…
Trump's 100 days: Foreign Policy and Security Implications - Introduction
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Studies on Security on 25 July 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21624887.2017.1355153\n\n‘I think the 100 days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful,’ Trump (2017) declared in an April 2017 interview. Yet candidate Trump (2016) had also issued a ‘100 day action plan to Make America Great Again’. The first ‘…
The Reinvention of Vouchers for a Color-Blind Era: A Racial Orders Account
Historically, vouchers, which provide a sum of money to parents for private education, were tools of racist oppression; but in recent decades some advocates claim them as “the civil rights issue of our time.” This article brings an analytic-historical perspective rooted in racial orders to understand how education vouchers have been reincarnated and reinvented since the Jim Crow era. Combining original primary research with statistical analysis, …
Attenuated Governance: How Policymakers Insulate Private School Choice from Legal Challenge
Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communi…
Electoral Accountability for Rising Tuition in the US: Evidence from a Survey Experiment and Observational Data
Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students' well-being.While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood.In this article, we focus on electoral accountability that policy makers face for rising tuition by examining vo…
Litigating Policy Drift: Frozen Categories and Thresholds in Court
The combination of rigid policy rules with shifting political, economic, and social environments can produce drift: policy change without formal modification. We know much about the political origins and consequences of drift but little about the legal battles that accelerate or impede it. I identify two distinct forms of policy rigidity that generate drift: interval freezing and categorical freezing. Drawing from recent and historical cases enco…
Rethinking America's racial policy alliances: Beyond 'Repair' and 'Protect
District Protectionism: Public Opinion on Race, Partisanship, and Redistricting Change
What do people value in redistricting? This paper presents three original survey experiments to examine public attitudes toward redistricting, including partisan gerrymandering, majority-minority districts, and traditional criteria such as compactness and contiguity. The experiments reveal an orientation I term 'district protectionism': a preference for minimal changes to existing districts, even when retaining current boundaries preserves partis…
Redrawing Democracy: Quantifying House District Continuity and Change, 1789–2024
How have U.S. House districts changed since the Founding? When do mapmakers reshape districts—and when do they choose to preserve them? This article introduces the concept of “spatial protectionism”—the strategic minimization of district change—and develops four original measures to analyze redistricting changes from 1789 onward. I demonstrate how the strategic imperatives, racial context, and technical capabilities of mapmakers shape the magnitu…
Dilutive Drift: The Racial Impact of Low-Change Redistricting
As America’s racial composition shifts, states that minimize changes to existing districts in successive redistricting cycles can entrench racial disparities in representation, a process I term dilutive drift. Using novel spatial measures of US House district change between successive congresses, I show that packing and cracking can occur passively, and not only through deliberate gerrymandering. States with long histories of racial exclusion, su…
Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Public Administration (5 works) · Public Administration (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works)