Regina Lea Wagner

I am Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. Before attending graduate school at UW-Madison, I received my undergraduate degree in Political Science from Universität Regensburg in Regensburg, Germany.

My primary research interests include political representation, political parties, gender and politics and feminist theory, legislative politics, elections and voting behavior, as well as state and local politics. I focus on political representation of groups and their interests, democratic intermediaries, and the effect of structural reforms on representational processes and outcomes.

My current solo-authored working manuscript explores the conceptualization of women’s interests and their political representation on the national and state level in the U.S., and is titled “Patterns of Representation: Women’s Political Representation in the U.S. and the Conceptualization of Women’s Interests”. It investigates the interaction of gender, partisanship, and contextual receptiveness to women, a new measure I developed (and introduced in my article Invisible Forces). A co-authored book manuscript titled American Politics, 1770-2020: The Analytic History, currently under review, investigates the enduring connection between social cleavages, intermediary organizations, governmental structures, and the recurrent process of policy-making that springs from their interaction.

Together with Byron E. Shafer, I recently completed a book project titled “The Social Roots of American Politics: A Widening Gyre?” (2022), which attempts to recover the shaping influence of social backgrounds on political conflict in the United States since the Second World War and is available from Oxford University Press. Our previous book, “The Long War Over Party Structure: Democratic Representation and Policy Responsiveness in American Politics” (2019) explores the effect of party structure on political representation and policy alignment and is available from Cambridge University Press. Additionally, my solo-authored book “Electoral Patterns in Alabama” (2022), which explores county-level electoral shifts in Alabama between 1945 and 2020, is available from Palgrave-Macmillan.