Brian Adams

Office: NH 122 | Phone: (619) 594-4289 | Email: [email protected]

Curriculum Vitae 

Brian Adams joined the political science department at SDSU in 2003 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. Brian’s research explores why local governments do not live up to their democratic potential. As small jurisdictions, localities should be “closer to the people,” allowing for more extensive citizen participation and greater accountability. Yet participation in local government is dismally low, and local officials are often unresponsive to citizen demands. Local governments, rather than being hotbeds of democratic activity are often corrupt and unresponsive entities dominated by elites. What accounts for this pattern?

Brian’s research approaches this question from a two different angles. His forthcoming book, Activism, Majority Rule, and Local Democracy: Rethinking Public Influence, argues that activism and majority rule are often in tension and constitute distinct paths of public influence. Even if all residents were active in local politics, on any given issue activists will exhibit biases and likely advocate for policies different than what the majority prefers. Activism can be beneficial, but we need to conceptualize it as distinct from majority rule, and our focus should be on how to manage the tension between the two. Thus, improving local democracy is not just a matter of generating more activism, but requires articulating when we want policy to reflect majority preferences and when we want activists to hold sway. This builds on his first book, Citizen Lobbyists, which found that even though citizens take advantage of the many opportunities they have to participate, the manner in which they do so and the issues they choose to influence yields minimal benefit to the political system as a whole.

The second strand of Brian’s research has examined local elections as a democratic practice. His book Campaign Finance in Local Elections: Buying the Grassroots examines whether the campaign finance system undermines the capacity of local elections to enhance the democratic character of American elections more generally. As the smallest units in the American political system, localities have the potential to contribute to democratic practices by fostering accessibility to the political system, promoting competitiveness, and reducing the biases seen in state and national elections. Yet the manner in which local candidates raise and spend campaign funds undermines these goals. Brian has also examined the cues that voters use when making decisions, finding that municipal candidates with a business background are less successful than those with political experience. In an separate article, he found that when faced with a candidate who shares their party affiliation but disagrees on specific policy issues, voters tended to vote their party anyway, although there were significant numbers who defected from their party.

In addition to research and teaching courses at SDSU, Brian has done two stints of teaching overseas. In 2009, he spent six months at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea on a Faculty Fulbright grant, teaching American Politics to Korean students and researching Korean local government, For the 2011-12 academic year he taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing center in Nanjing, China, teaching courses on democracy and American politics to Chinese master’s students.