Like many of his fellow Commonwealth alumni/ae, Maxwell Palmer likes to think, setting his brain on tough questions and meaty problems like partisan gerrymandering or the housing crisis in Massachusetts (no small feats). Now a researcher and professor at Boston University, Maxwell studies American political institutions, with a focus on how institutional arrangements and rules impact representation and policy outcomes. He also works as a consultant and expert witness on questions about voting rights, redistricting, and representation. Keep reading to learn how Maxwell applied his love of math to a career in political science, what his research has revealed about the housing crisis, and how students can make a difference in local politics—right now. 

Getting to Know You

What is bringing you joy right now? 

I’m looking forward to the weekend with my kids, who are six and nine. Fall sports season just ended, so we have a very short run of quiet weekends before winter stuff picks up. My younger son does soccer and baseball. Ice skating starts a couple weeks after Thanksgiving, then basketball starts…

What is your favorite book (or a book you’ve re-read)?

That's a really hard question. One of my favorites has always been The Count of Monte Cristo, which I've read multiple times. A recent favorite has been Babel by R.F. Kuang. I really loved it as fiction but it also raises a lot of interesting  questions about academia and government and power that really stuck with me. 

What do you think is the most intriguing paradox? 

I don't know if it would fall under the category of “paradox,” but impossibility theorems: instances where we can prove that there’s a bunch of things we want to achieve but it’s impossible to achieve them all, and that’s when we have to think about the different compromises inherent in the choices we have to make. Arrow’s Theorem is a famous one from economics, and there are others in political science about how groups make decisions and about how we allocate power in, say, the House of Representatives. 

What are your favorite comfort foods? 

Macaroni and cheese.

What was/is your favorite class (at Commonwealth or elsewhere)? 

It's hard to pick one from Commonwealth. Just a couple weeks ago, my wife [Cori Palmer '04] and I were cleaning out our basement and found probably every book from my Commonwealth education: Beginning with Poems, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby. There were a lot of history books; though I loved all the history classes at Commonwealth, Medieval History with Barbara Grant sticks out as a favorite. And I still think about the math I took at Commonwealth, because I got this amazing education that really set me off in college and grad school, and still benefits me every day.

When do you feel the most enjoyably challenged? 

I'm very lucky that I get to do research I love, so I'm enjoyably challenged by that research and by getting to think really hard about interesting questions. Right now, a lot of those questions are about housing and how communities that want to be inclusive—the ones that have voters who say they prefer progressive candidates and vote for progressive candidates and support these policies—actually fail to achieve progressive outcomes. Why does that happen, and what can people do about it?

Pen or pencil? 

Pen.

Coffee or tea? 

Coffee. Lots of it.

Fall, winter, spring, or summer?

Summer and winter. I'm not going to choose between them.

Life During and After Commonwealth

What was your first impression of Commonwealth and how did it map to your experience?

I don’t remember my first impression, but I had a really hard time my freshman year, just getting used to the academics. I've rarely been as challenged as I was here, but learning how to work that hard has benefited me ever since. At Commonwealth, I learned how to write, I learned how to take the time to think about things deeply, and I learned to read critically. Those skills put me in a position to take courses in college in any discipline. So it really laid a great foundation.

When and how did you first become interested in political science? 

I was always interested in politics in high school, and I feel like that's something my friends and I talked about a lot. We were freshmen for the 2000 election with Bush v. Gore, and then the Iraq War started in our junior year, so that was a very formative period for me. I went into college planning on double majoring in chemistry and political science. I ultimately dropped the chemistry for math, which was a great choice for me, but I never really thought I'd have a career in political science. 

After college, I was an economic consultant for a year. I really liked doing research projects, and I thought, “Okay, I like this idea of research as a career, but as a consultant, you have to move on when your client is done with your project, even if you're not ready to move on. What if you want to keep thinking about this question?” So, I started thinking more about academia as a career. And modern political science often has a lot of math, quantitative methods, computing, and statistics, so it was a really good fit for my interests.

What does a typical workday look like for you? 

Every day is different, which is really nice. Some days I'm teaching. This semester, I teach a data science class for undergraduate students. It's introducing them to programming and statistics, as well as to how to think about quantitative social science research, how to think about questions of causality, how to figure out if there's a causal relationship between variables, and how to design research. I love teaching that class. It's really fun. 

I'm also teaching a smaller senior seminar about prohibition, so it's half history, half political science. We think about temperance movements, from U.S. alcohol prohibition to global temperance movements to more recent regulatory movements, like the war on drugs.

When I’m working on research, I spend my time reading, collecting and cleaning data, analyzing data, and writing. I tend to collaborate on papers, so I meet with my co-authors and we develop new ideas and figure out how to solve various problems.

Tell us more about your current research into housing and gerrymandering. 

These days, about half of my research is on local politics, particularly around housing but also other infrastructure issues. So I’m thinking about who's involved in local politics and what shapes local decision making. 

My first book [Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, 2019, with Katherine Levine Einstein and David M. Glick] was really about whose voices get heard and how the people who are most involved in the process can really distort the views that public officials hear and then the decisions that are made about permitting housing. That really can limit housing and contributes to the housing crisis. My work now is about some other dimensions contributing to the housing crisis, things like how towns try to structure where they build housing, restrictions who gets to live in that new housing, what kinds of people get to move into various communities, and how towns might use public land or environmental regulations to prevent or make it really hard to build new housing—and not just to protect the environment. 

The other half of my research is about voting rights. Some of it is very theoretical, thinking about better ways to, say, draw redistricting maps and deal with partisan gerrymandering. And then some of it is really applied. I work as an expert witness in court, testifying in state or federal voting-rights cases about racial gerrymandering or barriers to voting. I analyze data and prepare expert reports, trying to understand if there’s a barrier to voting and thinking about who's affected by different kinds of laws and what those effects might be.

How do you think about and interpret the current state of the Metro Boston housing market?

We need more housing at every price point, and we need more programs for more affordable housing, but I see some small steps forward. Over the last couple of years, the state legislature has passed some good bills. The MBTA Communities Act has forced cities and towns to improve zoning in some places and, most importantly, to allow zoning that makes it easier to build multi-family housing near public transit. And then a bill passed this summer (the Affordable Homes Act) also addresses some other areas that might allow for more housing construction. Progress is slow and incremental. We need lots of things to allow lots of different kinds of housing to be built to really address the cost and availability problems we’ve been seeing. 

How would you suggest young people—particularly those too young to vote—engage in politics?

Well, one thing they can do is show up at public meetings in their towns or cities. There are so many of these meetings about so many different issues. For example, every zoning board or planning board meeting has a public comment period for every building project that needs a special permit. Homeowners in these towns are notified about these meetings and invited to come speak, but there's no one to speak for the future residents of these properties, because we don't know who they are yet. So Commonwealth students could go to those meetings and speak for those people and say, “We need more housing here, built at Maxwellimum allowable density.”

And students can do the same thing in lots of other public meetings for issues they care about. In these meetings, you don't have to be a voter; anyone can speak. Some of the meetings are virtual; some, you have to go in person. They can take a long time, but it’s a good exercise: participating in and really seeing how your local government works. Who actually is making the decisions in your community?

Meet More Alumni/ae