Kisoo Kim

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Effective Lawmaking at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy in 2025.

Representative democracy rests on two assumptions: that elections push politicians to serve voters, and that voters know enough to hold them accountable. My work asks how far each actually holds in American politics, drawing primarily on design-based causal inference and original large-scale data on what representatives do once in office, with formal theory where it sharpens the question.

One strand of my research follows the first assumption: whether electoral competition makes legislators serve voters better. I find that competitive pressure changes how hard legislators work, not where they stand—they invest more effort to hold their seats but rarely move their policy positions, even against ideologically extreme challengers or after a lost primary has put reelection out of reach. Beyond competition itself, I examine how the electoral institutions that structure it—the Electoral College and electoral reforms—shape the incentives legislators face and the choices put before voters. The other strand follows the second assumption: because accountability depends on what people know, I trace how each new medium—newspapers, radio, television, and today's fragmented media markets—has reshaped the relationship between representatives and the constituents they answer to.