Center Personnel
University of Virginia
Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy
Professor of Public Policy and Politics
Craig Volden is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking. He is a Professor of Public Policy and Politics, with appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He studies the politics of public policy, with a focus on what policy choices arise within legislative institutions and within American federalism.
His work on effective lawmaking includes Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers, co-authored with Alan Wiseman, which develops a methodology for scoring the lawmaking effectiveness of each member of Congress, identifying how lawmakers could better address the nation’s policy problems. That work won the Fenno Prize for the best book on legislative politics and the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy. He has published numerous articles in such journals as: American Political Science Review; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Legislative Studies Quarterly; and State Politics and Policy Quarterly.
Vanderbilt University
Associate Provost of Strategic Projects
Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Economy
Professor of Political Science and Law
Alan Wiseman is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking. He is the Chair of the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt University, where he is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Economy and a Professor of Political Science and Law. He has research and teaching interests in American political institutions and positive political economy, focusing on legislative politics, regulation and bureaucratic policy making, and business-government relations.
He is the co-author (with Craig Volden) of Legislative Effectiveness in the United States Congress: The Lawmakers, which won the 2015 Fenno Prize for the best book on legislative politics and the 2015 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy. He is also the author of The Internet Economy: Access, Taxes, and Market Structure (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), and has published numerous scholarly articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics.
Associate Director
Colin Achilles is the Associate Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, where he is the manager of day-to-day operations. Prior to joining the Center, he worked at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget with a focus on the organization’s FixUS initiative. He has also interned and volunteered for the federal and state legislatures as well as other nonprofit groups.
George Hadijski
Senior Program Associate
George Hadijski is the Senior Program Associate of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, where he is responsible for increasing the use of the Center’s research by lawmakers, their staffs, and their influencers. Prior to joining the Center, he worked at the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF), where he was responsible for the oversight and management of CMF’s training and management consulting services provided to US House and Senate offices, the joint legislative operations training program conducted in coordination with the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, key roles in CMF’s annual Democracy Awards, and individual congressional office consultations. He also worked at the US House of Representatives for 27 years and spent most of his career at the Committee on House Administration.
Paige Higginson-Rollins
Program Director for State Legislatures
Paige Higginson-Rollins is the Program Director for State Legislatures at the Center for Effective Lawmaking, where she is dedicated to empowering state legislatures, lawmakers, and stakeholders to improve the effectiveness of legislative institutions. Prior to joining the Center, she worked on public health communications and research initiatives in Michigan and Kentucky. In 2013, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kentucky in international relations and economics and earned her master’s degree in public health in 2016. She is passionate about bridging research and practice and hopes to provide data-driven insights and actionable strategies to foster collaboration, innovation, and impactful policymaking at the state level.
