UVA Batten faculty recognized for innovative state policy research

September 9, 2026

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This post was originally published on this site.

The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy is home to faculty researchers studying the conditions that make state governments, agencies and institutions more responsible servants of their constituencies. With wide-ranging expertise, from public health to nuclear non-proliferation policies to partisan communication to electoral responsiveness, these experts are uniquely positioned to translate their research into impact by engaging today’s policymakers as the trusted, impartial voices of what works and more importantly, what could work better and more efficiently.

Two of these faculty members, Ben Goehring and Craig Volden, have recently earned national recognition for their research on how state governing bodies and institutions function and why studying them matters. Their achievements reflect UVA Batten’s commitment to understanding governance at every level and to the necessity of using data-backed evidence to deliver real-world policy solutions.

Bureaucracies need bureaucrats; but why do they leave?

When he set out to determine the focus of his doctoral research, Ben Goehring, assistant professor of public policy and politics, wanted to couple his interests in American political institutions and how bureaucracies function with a desire to employ interesting, untapped data in a new and innovative way. That’s what led him to dive into the deep wells of U.S. state personnel rosters.

“States maintain a long history of this kind of data, so there’s a lot of it,” Goehring said. “But no one was using this wealth of data as a basis for examining the causes of public sector employee turnover.”

Goehring received his doctorate in 2025 in political science and public policy from the University of Michigan and joined UVA Batten in August 2025. His award-winning dissertation titled “The States of American Bureaucracy” uses millions of individual records to explore the factors that lead to bureaucratic turnover.

“Across three papers, I used new U.S. state employee personnel data to examine both the effects of civil service reforms that walk back employees’ tenure protections and the impacts of workplace conditions on employees’ willingness to remain in the public sector,” Goehring’s dissertation states.

Civil service protection rollbacks in Mississippi and Florida

Initially, Goehring set out to use this new personnel data to examine the effects of states making it easier to terminate public employees, focusing on Mississippi and Florida as case studies.

Beginning in the late 19th century, civil service protections were implemented to eliminate the so-called “spoils system”, in which a winning political party rewarded its supporters with government jobs. After decades of corruption and inefficient mass layoffs of civil servants, there was a need to incentivize public employees to remain in their jobs during administration transitions, gain expertise and build institutional knowledge.

Over the last 30 years, however, there’s been an increasing pushback to eliminate civil service protections at both the federal and state levels. Goehring wondered if, in states that were experimenting with a rollback in civil service protections, the personnel data – coupled with voter registration data – reflect that governors and agency heads were using these rollbacks to fire their political opponents, resulting in widescale purges.

Through the study of data in the two states, Goehring found that poor performance, seniority and working in an agency that often conflicted on issues with the ruling administration could lead to an increased likelihood of being dismissed or departing following the rollback of civil service protections. He did not find evidence “for the type of political cronyism feared by some critics of civil service reform.”

“My results do suggest that removing tenure protections can lead to more strategic management of personnel,” Goehring wrote in his dissertation conclusion. “In Mississippi and Florida, this did not manifest as ideological or partisan targeting, but it could in other political environments.”

Excessive heat and correctional officer departures in Texas

Although his initial motivation was to study the effects of states’ rollbacks of civil service protections, when Goehring began collecting states’ personnel data, he realized he was able to hone in on turnover trends related to specific types of public sector employees.

In Texas, he acquired detailed, monthly personnel data from January 2010 to January 2023 of all the correctional officers working in the state – a job sector plagued by a nationwide understaffing crisis that puts both incarcerated people and correctional officers at greater risk of harm. When paired with information on prison facilities, Goehring found that in the summer months, when the heat can be extreme in the Lone Star State, turnover was significantly higher in unairconditioned prisons relative to those with air conditioning.

“Overall, our findings from Texas suggest that while air conditioning does not alleviate all of the problems faced by correctional officers, it does impact employees’ decisions to remain in their positions,” Goehring said.

Extreme heat has long been an issue in Texas – and many other states’ – prisons. Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the state of Texas by incarcerated people arguing that uncooled prisons violate the Eight Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause. What is unique about Goehring’s findings, though, is that he argues that extreme temperatures are a workforce retention issue, not just a moral and constitutional one.

Texas is already spending a lot of money to remedy understaffing issues through overtime costs, in attracting and hiring new employees, and through salary increases to try to incentivize current employees to stay. His research provides an economic argument that investing in improving workplace conditions by installing air conditioning is another complementary tool to improve staffing challenges.

“We are far from the first to show that American prisons are dangerous, inhospitable places,” Goehring’s dissertation states. “Temperature-controlled prisons are not only a moral or constitutional issue. Given our findings, air conditioning can likely help correctional agencies contend with significant recruitment and retention issues.”

Goehring hopes his research will incite more questions about state agencies and their employees to foster a better understanding of these institutions. He noted his excitement about being at UVA Batten – a place that not only supports turning research into policy action, but also where his colleagues are similarly working to advance state policy and politics research.

Using the first-ever state legislator effectiveness scores to promote better governance

Craig Volden, professor of public policy and politics, is the co-director for the Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL), a partnership between UVA Batten and Vanderbilt University. CEL’s primary mission is to study and promote effective lawmaking in U.S. legislative institutions.

Since 2017, CEL has been attributing an effectiveness score to every member of Congress, which is based on 15 indicators that capture the proven ability of a legislator to advance their agenda items through the legislative process and into law. Factors include how many bills a lawmaker puts forth, how far bills get through the legislative process and how substantive the bill is.

“When we’re talking about reforms in Congress, it can be helpful to look at the states as laboratories of political science institutions,” Volden said. “So a few years ago, we got interested in applying similar scoring methodologies to state legislators. We wanted to understand more about how policies are made through state legislatures and where the powers of influence lie.”

A moderator and two panelists speak at an event on effective lawmaking.
CEL’s Volden, center, and Wiseman, right, participate at the Guinn Center’s Gallagher Dialogues on Effective Lawmaking in February 2025 in Reno, Nevada.
Volden and his co-authors recently won the Best Journal Article Award from the State Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association for their paper titled, “Legislative Effectiveness in the American States,” which was their first release of legislator scores across all 99 state legislative chambers in the U.S.

Even with all the variation across state lawmaking bodies – like differences in their makeup, legislator term limits, meeting cadence, etc. – the CEL scores provide a way for researchers to examine which lawmakers are most effective and why.

Volden and his colleagues use the scores to ask questions that could inform broader implications across legislative bodies, such as whether lawmakers are more effective if they specialize in one particular policy area. Or, is the majority party really influential in a state or do both majority and minority parties work well together? One finding that is of interest for further exploration, Volden noted, was how although research shows that women are more effective than men in Congress, this finding was not consistent in the states.

“This first set of state legislator scores marks the beginning of a decades-long agenda for scholars to study how we get the laws and policies we have in the states,” Volden said. “From our point of view, we also want to know how the lawmaking process could work better and how we can promote the skills and conditions for effective lawmaking.”

Part of the purpose of releasing scores and lists highlighting the top 10 most effective lawmakers in each state is to incentivize legislators and recognize those doing good work. The more important part for Volden is direct engagement with lawmakers on how they can be more successful in working within their respective systems to enact change for their communities.

“There is a lot of training available to new members of Congress, but almost nothing exists for state legislators,” Volden said. “Our new guide for newly elected members will be distributed to every legislator this fall. In it, we offer broadly applicable lessons based on our conversations with effective lawmakers across the nation and decades of data on legislative activities of state legislatures.”

When asked why Volden thinks UVA Batten is the right home for this work and his earlier research on state policy diffusion, he noted that the efforts fit naturally within the school’s mission. “Part of what we seek to do at UVA Batten is to cultivate ethical leaders. That can be accomplished with a greater focus on state lawmakers.”

Volden noted that CEL has found support in other organizations similarly dedicated to strengthening American democratic institutions. “We have been fortunate to work with partners, like the Hewlett Foundation and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, that share the Batten School emphasis in combining rigorous research with real-world engagement,” Volden said.

CEL plans to continue its outreach to state legislatures through the fall and will release updated scores for state legislators in the spring following the November 2026 elections.

This article was originally published here: [CANONICAL_URL]