Welcome

Hello! My name is Scott LaCombe and I'm a an Assistant Professor of Government and Statistical and Data Sciences at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  My PhD is in Political Science from the University of Iowa. 

My primary research interests focus on the politics and policy in the American states. In particular, I focus on the role of institutions in strengthening or weakening the influence of public opinion on policy. I take a big data approach to answer questions on how institutions affect policy responsiveness and policy diffusion.  Lastly, I study how policies affect state and local populations, including how institutions affect population health and broadband internet deployment affects economic well-being.  I use a variety of methods including multi-level modeling, duration analysis, factor analysis, and network analysis. I have published in the Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Policy Studies Journal, State Politics and Policy Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly. 

I've recently published a coauthored book titled Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities with Karen Mossberger and Caroline Tolbert at Oxford University Press. In this project, we show how the rise of broadband has changed state and local communities. We demonstrate that broadband makes communities more prosperous, resilient, and innovative, while also being central to bringing rural communities into the 21st century digital economy.

I am part of an NSF funded project to develop new, comprehensive data on state policy adoptions. The first step of this project, the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion Database can be found on Harvard Dataverse.

I am also part of a partner ship with GoDaddy called Venture Forward that evaluates the role of broadband access the density of domains on economic growth. This research has been featured in the New York Times and the Brookings Institute. 

I have recently formed a state politics lab at Smith College, where we are tracking LGBTQ policy adoptions and proposals nationally to understand how this rapidly changing policy environment intersects with important questions of how to design democracies and minority right protections.

You can check out my CV here, and my research and teaching in the link above .
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Scott LaCombe
[email protected]
201 Wright Hall, Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063
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