Professor Hershey's research and teaching interests focus on political parties, campaigns, and elections. With regard to research, she continues to examine the process by which political activists and journalists construct explanations for election results - what they think the results mean, out of the welter of possible explanations that could account for why one candidate won and another candidate lost, or why a party's fortunes changed in a particular election year.
One of her current research projects explores the degree to which explanations of the 1994 Republican victories in congressional elections persisted in media coverage of the 1998, 2002, and 2006 campaigns. She finds that although several forces were cited in 1994-1995 as explaining the Democrats' losses in congressional races that year (popular discontent with Bill Clinton, dissatisfaction with the Democrats, rejection of liberals, anti-big-government feelings), four years later the dominant reason given for the Republican victories in '94 was Newt Gingrich's strategic and tactical skill. This explanation of the Republican takeover persisted in 2002 media coverage, and appears to be extending into the 2006 coverage as well. Her work demonstrates that although journalists and campaigners tend to converge on a small number of accepted explanations for a given election result, those explanations can be modified by later events. In this case, Gingrich as Speaker of the House began to take up much greater political "space" after 1994, and the generally accepted explanations of the '94 elections came to be dominated by a discussion of Gingrich's role.
Hershey is also currently involved in research on the relationships among media coverage, campaign fund-raising, and poll numbers in presidential primaries, and in a national research project on competitive races in 2006. She has published two books of research and a number of articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Polity, Political Communication, The Annals, Social Science Quarterly, and American Politics Quarterly. Her research has also appeared in the form of chapters in edited volumes.
Among the courses she teaches regularly are Political Parties and Interest Groups, Environmental Policy, and Political Campaigns (at the undergraduate level), and Issues and Approaches in American Politics and Political Parties, Interest Groups, Social Movements, and the Media (at the graduate level). In 1999 she took over authorship of Party Politics in America, the major parties text begun by Frank Sorauf and then written by Paul Allen Beck; she has been responsible for the 9th through 12th editions of this text. She has been fortunate to have received several teaching awards.
She is extensively involved in community service, including volunteer work with Girl Scouts, the Hoosier Hills Food Bank, Sounds of South (the show and classical choir of Bloomington High School South), and other groups. Her professional service has included the presidency of the Midwest Political Science Association, a variety of program committees for national political science conventions and APSA and MWPSA committees (for instance, the APSA's Epstein Book Award committee for the best book on political parties published in 2004 or 2005, which she chaired in 2006), and programs to improve the teaching of government and politics at the high school and college levels.
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