Emily Cottle Ommundsen
Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Mississippi
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Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. I received my PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024, my M.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021, and my B.A. in Political Science and Religious Studies from Bucknell University in 2017. After graduating from Bucknell, I spent two years in Washington, DC where my fascination with the U.S. Congress grew. After working in both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate in personal and committee offices, I began pursuing a PhD in political science, studying the institution I had grown to love.

My research focuses on American political institutions, namely Congress and its functions. I study congressional procedure, effectiveness, and staffing, with recent work incorporating components of all three fields. In a paper published at Legislative Studies Quarterly, I developed a tool to assess congressional committees’ legislative effectiveness to determine the effect of committee staff experience on committee productivity. This paper was awarded the APSA Jewell-Loewenberg Prize in American Politics. In other work, published at Political Behavior, my co-author and I assess the benefits awarded to members by engaging in bipartisan legislative activity. We find that when members in the minority party counter message the majority party’s appeals to bipartisanship, members in the minority party can undermine the legislative accomplishments of their opponents, as well as approval for the legislature.