Why did you decide to explore this topic and what are you hoping to uncover through this research?

So this is a project that I started many years ago because I'm interested in how the country came to be so divided over cultural issues, and in particular, how we ended up with the partisan alignment on these issues that we have today.

So I'm working with a professor in the political science department at the University of Rochester.

And again, we started by focusing on the subnational level and we began by collecting state party platforms.

So in most states, both the Democratic and Republican Party every two years write a platform that's adopted at their state party convention.

And so we spent many, many years collecting these because we wanted to figure out when is it that parties start taking positions on these issues and why do they start taking those positions? And it turns out that the issue of abortion is an especially fascinating one Because if you go back, and this was really not a known fact until Professor Gam and I began working on this project.

If you go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and look at state legislatures, and you look at voting on the issue of abortion, and keep in mind that before Roe v.

What is the purpose of having these four subfields and what are the limitations of this structure?