Summer Research Associate

The CMC Policy Lab is now accepting applications for the 
2026 Summer Research Associates Program.

The program will hire up to eight students to work on one of two projects:
The first project builds on Lab research into evidence-based policymaking in Congress. To understand how outcomes-based legislating currently works in Congress, the Policy Lab has assessed how Congress employs pilot programs in legislation. Last year, in collaboration with the Bipartisan Policy Center partners, the Lab operationalized a definition of pilot programs and began to identify and categorize them in recent legislation. This summer we will be working on refining the coding protocols, and on automating the coding of pilot programs using a large language model (LLM). The project involves applied text-as-data methods, validity checks, programming, and understanding legislative texts and congressional procedure. 

The second project consists of two related empirical studies focused on courts and the design of legal institutions. The first examines how the size of civil juries, typically ranging from six to twelve members, affects trial outcomes such as verdicts, damages, and deliberation dynamics. Students will work with court records from PACER, contribute to data validation, and help implement a large language model (LLM)-based workflow to extract structured information from unstructured legal documents. The second study analyzes family law cases in the Los Angeles Superior Court to understand how legal representation, procedural reforms, and court practices shape the quality and durability of custody and support orders. This project will use similar methods to build a large-scale dataset of family court outcomes in Los Angeles. Together, these projects involve hands-on work with legal data, applied econometric research design, and text-as-data methods to inform policy debates on access to justice and the functioning of courts.

Duties
Summer Research Associates will work individually and in groups on qualitative and quantitative policy research, analysis, visualizations, and memo writing. Students will be expected to attend staff meetings, regularly coordinate with faculty supervisors between staff meetings, and interface with project partners via phone, email, and video conference. All program work will be performed remotely and will not require travel. 

Qualifications
Strong oral and written communication skills, as well as some prior experience in policy research, either in an academic or professional setting, are required. Preference will also be given to students who have not participated in the previous summer associates program. Candidates should highlight policy writing experience; courses taken in statistics, political methodology, or econometrics; or a proficiency with R, Stata, Tableau, or Python. While it is not required that Summer Research Associates have taken the Policy Lab course, students who have not will be required to participate in an orientation before the start of the program. 

Details
The program will run for eight weeks from May 18 through July 10. Associates will be paid $17.00 per hour with an expectation of half-time weekly work (20 hours per week). All associates must be available for all regular weekly meetings and regular staff communications throughout the program.
To apply, please submit a cover letter, resume, and transcript through Handshake by 11:59 p.m. PDT on Sunday, April 12. For more information on the CMC Policy Lab, please visit our website or contact Kelly Alexander at the Lowe Institute kalexander@cmc.edu.  

This opportunity is funded by the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at CMC.