Research
Publications
"Alphabet Soup: Randomized Ballot Order and the Representation of Marginalized Candidates," (with Sean Freeder and Rachel Bernhard). Forthcoming, Political Behavior.
Ballot order has the power to shape electoral outcomes: even when randomly assigned, candidates listed first receive more votes. Meanwhile, candidates from historically marginalized groups—such as women and ethnic minorities—tend to fare worse in low-salience or low-information contexts. We examine whether being listed first—an increase in salience—benefits these candidates more or less than their white and male counterparts. Leveraging a natural experiment from over 29,000 California local elections between 1995 and 2021, in which ballot order was randomly assigned, we estimate the causal effect of being listed first on vote share by candidate gender and ethnicity. We find that while all candidates receive a premium from appearing first, non-white candidates benefit significantly more than white candidates. This advantage varies with the partisan and racial composition of the electorate and with election timing. We close by discussing the implications of election design for equality of representation.
Online (open access) Replication data
"Dynamic Persuasion: Decay and Accumulation of the Persuasive Effects of Partisan Media," (with Matthew Baum, Adam Berinsky, Joohye Jeong, Zach Markovich, and Teppei Yamamoto). Forthcoming, Political Science Research and Methods.
Both academic researchers and political pundits have generally accepted several over-time features of persuasion by partisan media: that the persuasive effects of partisan media might be temporary and decay quickly after a single exposure, and that these effects accumulate from multiple exposures. That effects decay may serve to ameliorate concerns about the broad impact of such media on partisan polarization. Yet the assumption that persuasive effects accumulate may raise larger concerns from real-world repeat exposure. To explore these possibilities, we implement a novel set of multiwave experiments that allow us to examine concerns about media effects over time. We present estimates from three studies which suggest that the persuasive effect of exposure to just a short article or video clip can persist for up to a week. In contrast to this persistence, our results suggest that an experiment adequately powered to detect the cumulative effect from multiple doses of partisan media – let alone one powered to detect cumulative effects among subgroups of the population – would require an unrealistic number of respondents, suggesting that such effects are difficult to test in an experimental setting with limited resources.
Online (open access) Replication data
"Short-term exposure to `filter-bubble' recommendation systems has limited polarization effects: naturalistic experiments on YouTube," (with Naijia Liu, Xinlan Emily Hu, Yasemin Savas, Matthew A. Baum, Adam J. Berinsky, Allison J.B. Chaney, Christopher Lucas, Rei Mariman, Andrew M. Guess, Dean Knox, and Brandon Stewart). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(8). February 2025.
An enormous body of literature argues that recommendation algorithms drive political polarization by creating “filter bubbles” and “rabbit holes.” Using four experiments with nearly 9,000 participants, we show that manipulating algorithmic recommendations to create these conditions has limited effects on opinions. Our experiments employ a custom-built video platform with a naturalistic, YouTube-like interface presenting real YouTube videos and recommendations. We experimentally manipulate YouTube’s actual recommendation algorithm to simulate filter bubbles and rabbit holes by presenting ideologically balanced and slanted choices. Our design allows us to intervene in a feedback loop that has confounded the study of algorithmic polarization—the complex interplay between supply of recommendations and user demand for content—to examine downstream effects on policy attitudes. We use over 130,000 experimentally manipulated recommendations and 31,000 platform interactions to estimate how recommendation algorithms alter users’ media consumption decisions and, indirectly, their political attitudes. Our results cast doubt on widely circulating theories of algorithmic polarization by showing that even heavy-handed (although short-term) perturbations of real-world recommendations have limited causal effects on policy attitudes. Given our inability to detect consistent evidence for algorithmic effects, we argue the burden of proof for claims about algorithm-induced polarization has shifted. Our methodology, which captures and modifies the output of real-world recommendation algorithms, offers a path forward for future investigations of black-box artificial intelligence systems. Our findings reveal practical limits to effect sizes that are feasibly detectable in academic experiments.
Online (open-access) Replication data
"The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests," (with Matthew Harvey, Daniel Jones, and Christopher Warshaw). Science Advances 11(3). January 2025.
- Featured in the Harvard Gazette
In this paper, we examine whether mayors' partisan affiliations lead to differences in crime and policing. We use a large new dataset on mayoral elections and employ three different modern causal inference research designs (a regression discontinuity design centered around close elections and two robust difference-in-differences methods) to determine the causal effect of mayoral partisanship on crime, arrests, and racial differences in arrest patterns in medium and large US cities. We find no evidence that mayoral partisanship affects police employment or expenditures, police force or leadership demographics, overall crime rates, or numbers of arrests. At the same time, we find some suggestive evidence that mayoral partisanship may modestly affect the racial composition of arrests. Overall, the results from our multi-method analyses indicate that local partisan politics has little causal impact on crime and policing.
Online (open-access) Replication data
"How Self-Interest and Symbolic Politics Shape the Effectiveness of Compensation for Nearby Housing Development," (with Michael Hankinson). Journal of Public Policy 44(4): 785-808. December 2024.
Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.
Online (open-access) Replication data
"How Partisanship in Cities Influences Housing Policy," (with Daniel Jones and Christopher Warshaw). American Journal of Political Science 69(1): 64-77. January 2025.
Housing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage housing policy data and a new data source of 15,615 city council elections and 3,261 mayoral elections in large cities in the United States and a regression discontinuity design to examine partisan divides in housing policy among the mass public as well as the impact of local leaders' partisanship on housing policy. We provide robust evidence that electing mayors from different political parties shapes cities’ housing stock. Electing a Democrat as mayor leads to increased multifamily housing production. These effects are concentrated in cities where councils have less power over land use changes. Overall, our paper shows that politics influences local housing policy, and it contributes to a larger literature on local political economy.
Online Preprint Replication data
"How the Identity of Substance Users Shapes Public Opinion on Opioid Policy," (with Michael Hankinson). Political Behavior 46(1): 609-629. March 2024.
How do media portrayals of potential policy beneficiaries' identities sway public support for these policies in a public health setting? Using a pre-registered vignette experiment, we show that the racial identity of substance users depicted in news media shapes public opinion on policies to address the opioid crisis. People display biases in favor of their own racial identity group that manifest in their support for both treatment-based policies and punitive policies. We show that these biases may be moderated by the type of initial drug used by a substance user and associated levels of perceived blame. Extending theories of group politics, we also assess favoritism based on gender and residential context identities, but find no such biases. These results highlight the continued centrality of race in the formation of policy preferences.
Online (open-access) Appendix Replication data
“American Local Government Elections Database," (with Diana Da In Lee, Yamil Velez, and Christopher Warshaw). Nature: Scientific Data 10 (912), December 2023.
The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new database of about 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in the U.S. over the last three decades. This is the most comprehensive publicly-available source of information on local elections across the country. We provide partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as electoral outcomes. This new database will facilitate a myriad of new research on representation and elections in local governments.
Online (open-access) Replication data
"Media Measurement Matters: Estimating the Persuasive Effects of Partisan Media with Survey and Behavioral Data," (with Matthew Baum, Adam Berinsky, Chloe Wittenberg, and Teppei Yamamoto). Journal of Politics, 85(4). October 2023.
- Featured in MIT News
To what extent do partisan media polarize political attitudes? Although recent methodological advancements have improved scholars' ability to identify the persuasive effects of exposure to partisan media, past studies typically rely on self-reported media preferences, which may not reflect actual news consumption behavior. Using individual-level web-tracking data, we construct two measures of revealed media preferences based on the volume and slant of news that individuals consume. Overall, we observe substantial overlap in the media diets of individuals across stated preference groups, suggesting that self-reported measures of media preferences may overstate the degree of selective exposure to online news. Moreover, our measures of revealed and stated preferences generate differing conclusions regarding heterogeneity in partisan media's persuasive impact. Whereas measures of stated preferences raise the possibility of persuasion by counter-attitudinal sources, measures of revealed preferences instead indicate that individuals with ideologically extreme media diets are primarily influenced by pro-attitudinal outlets.
Online Preprint Replication data
"Driving Turnout: The Effect of Car Ownership on Electoral Participation," (with Maxwell Palmer). Political Science Research and Methods 11(3): 654-662. July 2023.
- Featured in VICE News and BuzzFeed News
Inequalities in voter participation between groups of the population pose a problem for democratic representation. We use administrative data on 6.7 million registered voters to show that a previously-ignored characteristic of voters -- access to a personal automobile -- creates large disparities in in-person voting rates. Lack of access to a car depresses election day voter turnout by substantively large amounts across a variety of fixed-effects models that account for other environmental and voter characteristics. Car access creates the largest hindrance to voting for those people who live farther from the polls, for young voters, and for non-white voters. These effects do not appear for absentee voting, suggesting a simple policy solution to solve large disparities in political participation. This study contribute to the theoretic understanding of political participation as well as the impact of potential policy reforms to solve participatory gaps.
Online Preprint Replication data
"Men and Women Candidates Are Similarly Persistent After Losing Elections," (with Rachel Bernhard). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(26). June 2021.
Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the number of women running for office for the first time has skyrocketed. Nonetheless, commentators suggested this phenomenon might in fact be bad news for women: inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 211,123 candidates across 22,009 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women's lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women’s decision-making differs from men's at the point of entry into politics---not at the point of re-entry.
Online (open-access) Replication data
"Strategic Government Communication About Performance." Political Science Research and Methods 10(3): 601-616. March 2021.
A great deal of research presents the correspondence between economic conditions and incumbent electoral fortunes as evidence of democratic accountability. A central theoretical mechanism for this phenomenon is that voters have information about performance. Using communications data consisting of more than 110,000 government press releases from cities in the U.S. combined with fine-grained economic and crime data, I leverage the breadth of local variation in conditions to assess the inputs to this mechanism behind accountability. I provide causal evidence that strategic government communication distorts reality: local politicians are more likely to communicate about both economic conditions and crime when performance is improving --- better wages and less crime --- than when performance is worse. These findings add direct evidence from the underutilized area of local politics that politicians strategically communicate in a way that threatens accountability.
Online Preprint Replication data
"Strategic Partisans: Electoral Motivations and Partisanship in Local Government Communication." Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy 2(2): 227-248. June 2021.
Politicians use their communication to present a strategic version of themselves to voters. One component of this is the ideological element of communication, which leaders can employ strategically when it is most electorally advantageous and depending on the qualities of their electorate. Using press releases from cities in the U.S., I show that these patterns of strategic communication extend to local politicians. While local politicians use communication that is distinguishable by their partisan identities, politicians engage in more or less partisan communication styles according to the electoral environment. When politicians' partisanship is well-matched to the ideological leanings of their population, their communication is easily distinguished from that of the opposite party, but when they are misaligned with their constituents' ideology, they communicate in a way that is more similar to the opposite party. These findings provide evidence that the electoral connection influences politicians strategic communication in a way that threatens accountability.
Online Preprint Appendix Replication data
"Accountability for the Economy at All Levels of Government in United States Elections," (with Christopher Warshaw). American Political Science Review 114(3): 660-676. August 2020.
- Our writeup in the Washington Post's Monkey Cage
- Featured in Deseret News
Retrospective voting is a crucial component of democratic accountability. A large literature on retrospective voting in the United States finds that the president’s party is rewarded in presidential elections for strong economic performance and punished for weak performance. In contrast, there is no clear consensus about whether politicians are held accountable for the local economy at other levels of government. In this study, we use administrative data on county-level economic conditions from 1969-2018 and election results across multiple levels of government to examine the effect of the local economy on elections for local, state, and national offices in the United States. We find that the president’s party is held accountable for economic performance across nearly all levels of government. In contrast, there is much weaker evidence that the party that controls other levels of government is held accountable for the economy.
Online Preprint Replication data
"Politics in Forgotten Governments: The Partisan Composition of County Legislatures and County Fiscal Policies," (with Christopher Warshaw). Journal of Politics 82(2): 460-475. April 2020.
- Featured in the Bangor Daily News and Governing
County governments are a crucial component of the fabric of American democracy. Yet there has been almost no previous research on the policy effects of the partisan composition of county governments. Most counties in the United States have small legislatures, usually called commissions or councils, that set their budgets and other policies. In this study, we examine whether counties with Democratic legislators spend more than counties with Republican ones. We assemble an original dataset of 10,708 elections in approximately 298 medium and large counties over the past 25 years. Based on a regression discontinuity design, we find that electing a Democratic legislator rather than a Republican one leads the average county to increase spending by about 5%. Overall, our findings contribute to a growing literature on the policy consequences of partisan control of state and local government. They show that the partisan selection of county legislators has important policy effects in county governments.
Online Preprint Replication data
“The Effect of Associative Racial Cues in Elections," (with Adam Berinsky, Michele Margolis, and Megan Goldberg). Political Communication 37(4): 512-529. March 2020.
How do racial signals associating a candidate with minority supporters change voters’ perceptions about a candidate and their support for a candidate? Given the absence of information in low-salience campaigns and the presence of competing information in any campaign, voters may rely on heuristics — such as race — to make the process of voting easier. The information communicated by these signals may be so strong that they cause voters to ignore other, perhaps more politically relevant, information. In this paper, we test how associative racial cues sway voters’ perceptions of and support for candidates using two experiments that harness real-world print and audio campaign advertisements. We find that the signals in these ads can sometimes overwhelm cues about policy positions when the two are present together. Moreover, we find that such signals have limited effects on candidate support among black voters but that they risk substantial backlash of up to eight percentage points in reported vote intention among white voters. Our results highlight how voters gather and use information in low-information elections and demonstrate the power of campaign communication strategies that use racial associations.
Online Preprint Appendix Replication data
"Concentrated Burdens: How Self-Interest and Partisanship Shape Opinion on Opioid Treatment Policy," (with Michael Hankinson). American Political Science Review 113(4): 1078-1084. November 2019.
- Our writeup in the LSE's USA Public Policy blog
When does self-interest influence public opinion on contentious public policies? The bulk of theory in political science suggests that self-interest is only a minor force in public opinion. Using nationally-representative survey data, we show how financial and spatial self-interest and partisanship all shape public opinion on opioid treatment policy. We find that a majority of respondents support a redistributive funding model for treatment programs, while treatment funded by taxation based on a community's overdose rate is less popular. Moreover, financial self-interest cross-pressures lower-income Republicans, closing the partisan gap in support by more than half. We also experimentally test how the spatial burden of siting treatment clinics alters policy preferences. People across the political spectrum are less supportive when construction of a clinic is proposed closer to their home. These results highlight how partisanship and self-interest interact in shaping preferences on public policy with concentrated burdens.
Online Preprint Replication data
“Persuading the Enemy: Estimating the Persuasive Effects of Partisan Media with the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment Design," (with Matthew Baum, Adam Berinsky, and Teppei Yamamoto). American Political Science Review 113(4): 902-916. November 2019.
- Featured in MIT News
Does media choice cause polarization, or merely reflect it? We investigate a critical aspect of this puzzle: how partisan media contribute to attitude polarization among different groups of media consumers. We implement a new experimental design, called the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment (PICA) design, that incorporates both free choice and forced exposure. We estimate jointly the degree of polarization caused by selective exposure and the persuasive effect of partisan media. Our design also enables us to conduct sensitivity analyses accounting for discrepancies between stated preferences and actual choice, a potential source of bias ignored in previous studies using similar designs. We find that partisan media can polarize both its regular consumers and inadvertent audiences who would otherwise not consume it, but ideologically-opposing media potentially also can ameliorate existing polarization between consumers. Taken together, these results deepen our understanding of when and how media polarize individuals.
Online Preprint Appendix Replication data
"How Attribution Inhibits Accountability: Evidence from Train Delays." Journal of Politics 80(4): 1417-1422. October 2018.
- Featured in the Boston Globe
Do people hold politicians accountable for the performance of government? I test this question using individual-level experiences with the performance of one major public service: transportation. I compile records of transit performance, tracked via individuals' fare transactions and train delays, and link these data to opinion surveys. I show that people perceive different levels of performance, but fail to connect performance with judgments of government. I build on this by testing the importance of responsibility attribution on people's ability to hold government accountable. I find that when people are experimentally provided with information on government responsibilities, they are able to connect their experiences of performance with their opinions of government. These results demonstrate that confusion about government responsibilities can frustrate accountability.
Online Preprint Appendix Replication data
"Off-Cycle and Out of Office: Election Timing and the Incumbency Advantage." Journal of Politics 80(1): 119-132. January 2018.
- Featured in CityLab and the Palm Beach Post
Democratic accountability relies on the ability of citizens to reward and punish politicians in elections. Electoral institutions, such as the timing of elections, may play a powerful role in this process. In this paper, I assess how on-cycle (concurrent) and off-cycle elections affect one facet of accountability --- the incumbency advantage --- using data on nearly 10,000 mayoral elections in cities over the past 60 years. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that incumbency carries a substantial advantage for individual candidates. Moreover, I find that on-cycle elections provide incumbents with a far larger advantage than off-cycle elections do. These results show that election timing has important implications for electoral politics, and demonstrate one possible mechanism for the prevalence of the incumbency advantage.
Online Preprint Appendix Replication data
"Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy," (with Christopher Warshaw). Journal of Politics 78(4): 1124-1138. October 2016.
- Featured in The New York Times and Bloomberg
Does it matter for municipal policy which party controls the mayorship in municipal government? The bulk of the existing evidence says no. But there are a variety of theoretical reasons to believe that mayoral partisanship should affect municipal policy. We examine the impact of mayoral partisanship in nearly 1,000 elections in medium and large cities over the past 60 years. In contrast to previous work, we find that mayoral partisanship has a significant impact on the size of municipal government. Democratic mayors spend substantially more than Republican mayors. In order to pay for this spending, Democratic mayors issue substantially more debt than Republican mayors and pay more in interest. Our findings show that mayoral partisanship matters for city policy. Our findings add to a growing literature indicating that the constraints imposed on city policy making do not prevent public opinion and elections from having a meaningful impact on municipal policy.
Online Preprint Replication data
“Evidence in Voting Rights Act Litigation: Producing Accurate Estimates of Racial Voting Patterns." Election Law Journal 14(4): 361-381. December 2015.
Voting Rights Act litigation, even in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder, requires estimates of racial bloc voting, or the extent to which members of different racial groups vote differently. Although there are a variety of methods to make these estimates, direct evaluation and comparison of these methods is lacking. I examine these alternate methods in the way that they might be used in litigation using a large dataset of partisanship and racial information at the precinct level in five states. Additionally, I extend the application of these methods to estimation of racial group preferences in locations with more than one racial minority and assess the contextual determinants of larger and smaller errors in ecological regression estimates. I conclude that the ecological inference method developed by King (1997), which incorporates the deterministic precinct-level bounds on the quantities of interest and is easily implemented using open-source software, provides the best estimates for precinct-specific racial polarization using a binary racial split. When accounting for more than two racial groups, however, a similar but modified Multinomial-Dirichlet Bayesian model performs marginally better.
Other Publications
"Crime is nonpartisan and the blame game on crime in cities is wrong – on both sides" The Conversation, April 18, 2025 (with Christopher Warshaw). Online.
"Women are still underrepresented in local government, despite a woman running for president" The Conversation, September 16, 2024. Online.
"How opioid treatment centers can overcome bipartisan NIMBYism to build local support" The Conversation, May 22, 2024 (with Michael Hankinson). Online.
"Nonwhite people are drastically underrepresented in local government" The Conversation, January 29, 2024. Online.
"The problem with using inclusionary zoning to build affordable housing" The Boston Globe, February 22, 2023 (with Linda Bilmes, Brian Iammartino, and Rozalyn Mock). Online
"Can Inclusionary Zoning Be an Effective Housing Policy in Greater Boston? Evidence from Lynn and Revere" HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series, No. RWP23-006 (with Linda Bilmes, Brian Iammartino, and Rozalyn Mock). Online
"Concatenated Files Fixing Errors in the California Elections Data Archive (CEDA)" (with Rachel Bernhard). Raw files, composite file, documentation of error correction, and corrected composite file available on GitHub.
"What the Next Mayor Needs to Do about Boston’s Transportation Crisis" Confronting Boston's Challenges, Boston Area Research Initiative White Paper Series, September 10, 2021 (with Kathryn Carlson). Online
"Got Wheels? How Having Access to a Car Impacts Voting." Democracy Docket, October 16, 2020 (with Maxwell Palmer). Online
"A coronavirus recession would hurt all kinds of Republican candidates — not just Trump." The Washington Post, Monkey Cage, March 18, 2020 (with Christopher Warshaw). Online
"Democrats are more likely to support funding opioid treatment programs compared to Republicans, but both are opposed to building clinics nearby." LSE's USAPP – American Politics and Policy blog (with Michael Hankinson). Online
"Utilizing Javascript in Qualtrics for Survey Experimental Designs." The Political Methodologist. May 2019. Online
"Polarization and Media Usage: Disentangling Causality." In Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, 2019. Liz Suhay, Bernard Grofman, and Alex Treschel, eds. (with Matthew Baum and Adam Berinsky). Online
“Vote-Seeking Third Parties in the Twentieth Century" (with Ron Rapoport) in Guide to U.S. Political Parties, ed. Marjorie Hershey, CQ Press, 2014.
“A balancing act: Physical balance, through arousal, influences size perception" (with Michael Geuss, Jeanine Stefanucci, and Nicholas Stevens). Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 72(7): 1890-1902. October 2010.
Working Papers
"Partisan Polarization in Local Politics," (with Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, Maxwell Palmer, and Christopher Warshaw).
A growing body of scholarship investigates the extent to which national partisan polarization filters down to the local level. There has been little evidence, however, on: (1) the size of the local partisan divide; (2) the extent to which it varies by policy issue; and (3) how these divides compare at the elite and the mass public levels. Using responses to questions about local policy preferences from nearly a decade of nationwide surveys of mayors and from 25,521 members of the public in 87 cities between 2020 and 2023, we uncover notable variation in local partisan polarization. We find substantial polarization across a number of local policy issue areas and less in others. Just as others have found at the national level, we find that elite partisan polarization is more substantial than it is among members of the public on nearly every policy issue for which we have directly comparable data. We also find, by using the subset of data for which we have mayors and their constituents answering identical questions, that mayors take positions aligned with their constituents’ about 61% of the time. While Democratic mayors align with their Democratic constituents more than with their Republican ones, and Republican mayors do the opposite, the differences are modest against the background of polarization in America. Together, these results reaffirm the pre-eminence of partisanship in the formation of public opinion, challenge a traditional consensus that local politics is apartisan, and establish scope conditions on when partisanship might shape the policy outputs of local government.
"Nationalization in Local Elections" (with Daniel Naftel, John Sides, and Christopher Warshaw).
There is an important debate about how much the nationalization of American politics has affected local politics. We provide new evidence on local voting behavior from the largest survey to date of U.S. voters in local elections. We show that voting for partisan local offices resembles voting in state and federal elections, with voters' choices strongly connected to their party identification and their views on national policies. In nonpartisan local elections, voters' choices are less strongly related to party identification but remain linked to national policy attitudes. In both types of local elections, voting is only weakly related to attitudes toward local policies. However, because local policy attitudes are correlated with party identification and national policy attitudes, even ``nationalized" voting still allows voters to choose local candidates who match their views on local policies. Our findings thus speak to the nature of representation in local governments.
"The Electoral and Policy Effects of Election Timing in City and County Governments," (with Christopher Warshaw).
In recent years, a consensus has developed among scholars that the timing of elections has large effects on the electoral and political process at the local level. This literature has found that on-cycle elections lead to higher turnout, change the composition of the electorate, and could impact local governments' policy outputs. But much of this work has focused on public schools. There has been little prior research on the impact of election timing on either elections or the broader political process in city and county governments. In this paper, we bring together a bevy of data sources on turnout in local elections, the outcomes of these elections, and local policy outputs. Overall, our results indicate there are significant participatory benefits to on-cycle local elections while few political consequences. Moving local elections on-cycle significantly increases overall voter turnout and the participation of younger and less wealthy voters. But it has negligible effects on the partisan composition of the electorate or the partisan and ideological outcomes of elections. Nor do on-cycle elections change the policy outputs of local governments. Our results help build a more holistic understanding of representation in local governments and the distinctive role of electoral institutions in facilitating representation.
"Where the Sidewalk Ends: How Participation Contributes to Inequity in Government Service Provision," (with Christian Schimpf).
Do biases in representation arise at the most basic levels of policy implementation, and can political participation contribute to these inequities? Leveraging over-time data from the City of Boston, I evaluate equity in the provision of a basic government service: the repair of sidewalks. I combine administrative data on the physical conditions of the city’s sidewalks with data on local residents’ use of the city’s 311 service request system to assess who is represented in local policy implementation. I show that the quality of basic city service provision is biased along existing racial and socioeconomic divisions. Sidewalks in more heavily minority and less wealthy neighborhoods improve at a rate below those sidewalks in whiter and wealthier neighborhoods. Moreover, participation can compensate for inequities in the improvement and deterioration of infrastructure. To the extent that residents in minority and low-income areas use 311 services to request repairs, their sidewalks improve at rates on par with those in whiter and wealthier places. Yet in places with low rates of official participation, inequities persist. Basic local government service provision can be subject to biases, and citizen participation may not be a panacea to resolve such inequities.
"Who Should Make Decisions? Public Perceptions of Democratic Inclusion in Housing Policy," (with Katherine Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer).
Who deserves to participate in local democracy? A wide body of research shows that property owners are deeply overrepresented in local political proceedings, especially those related to housing and land use. We know little, however, about whether such inequities conflict with the public's norms of democratic equality. This article explores perceptions of democratic inclusion in local housing politics, and whether these views can be altered with more information about political inequalities. Using survey data from 13,619 respondents across 57 cities, we find that: (1) members of the public prefer to hear from homeowners and longtime residents in political proceedings; and (2) disseminating information about local participatory inequalities increases the likelihood of the public wanting to hear from a renter, albeit by a substantively small amount. These results show that public persuasion may not be the most fruitful avenue for reforming these inequitable local political institutions.
"Funding the Growth Machine: The Effects of Municipal Campaign Contributions on Housing Policy Outcomes," (with Jennifer Gaudette).
Money in politics is the subject of great debate at every level of government, yet it has principally been studied at the federal level in the U.S. Where scholars have analyzed local campaign donations, their work has largely focused on understanding who donates and to what kind of candidates. The actual effects of political donations on local policy outcomes remain essentially unstudied. In this paper, we describe and leverage a novel data set of over 3 million municipal election campaign contributions covering thousands of U.S. cities. We focus on real estate industry contributions; using generalized difference-in-differences panel research designs, we examine the causal impact of real estate industry contributions to local political candidates on the permitting of new housing. Our results show that campaign contributions from organized interests influence housing policy outcomes at the local level. Specifically, more contributions from real estate development groups lead to increases in permitting of multi-family housing. Descriptive patterns in these data help explain these results. Real estate industry contributions largely are directed to non-incumbent candidates, and their effects are largest in open seat races, suggesting that this influence is via supporting new candidates who support more housing in their communities rather than via influence on incumbents. Our findings contribute to a broader understanding of the financial influence of interest groups in municipal policy as well as local politics more broadly.
“If You Build It, They Will Vote: How Infrastructure Builds Support for Public Transit,” (with Jared Kalow and Toby Nowacki).
Does public infrastructure investment build its own political constituency? Policy feedback theory holds that government programs reshape the coalitions that sustain them, yet credible causal evidence remains limited for place-based infrastructure. We exploit the staggered expansion of the Los Angeles Metro system across three consecutive countywide transit-funding ballot measures to estimate whether proximity to newly opened stations increases voter support for transit investment. Using precinct-level election returns, we find that gaining a nearby station increases ballot-measure support by approximately 2.7 percentage points — an effect robust across multiple modern difference-in-differences estimators. There is no evidence of a corresponding shift in presidential vote share, suggesting that there is no general partisan realignment as a result of transit expansion. The feedback effects of transit expansion are concentrated in areas with less pre-existing transit usage, consistent with a mechanism whereby new infrastructure converts unfamiliar voters into supporters. Using individual-level voter file data, we show that the effects operate through two channels: mobilization of existing voters near new stations and the attraction of new registrants to station-adjacent areas. These findings demonstrate that place-based investment can generate localized policy feedback that expands its own electoral coalition.
In Progress
"Violence Against Local Political Candidates" (with Yanilda González).
"Descriptive Representation Among Unelected Local Government Leadership" (with Jeremiah Cha).
"Street-Level Participation: Field Experimental Evidence on Smart City Technology and Voter Registration," (with Melissa Sands).
"Reducing Unsafe Driving and Excess Emissions Through Behavioral Nudges," (with Soubhik Barari).
“Civic Roundtable: Retaining Election Officials in a Time of Uncertainty” (with Jose Altamirano, Austin Boral, and Madeleine Smith).
“Voting Rights and Local Democracy” (with Desmond Ang).
Dormant Projects
“Realistic Image Primes in Experimental Research," (with Tess Wise).
Use of images as primes in social science experiments is widespread, but a standardized database of realistic diverse primes for this purpose has not been widely available to researchers. We develop an image database of faces of real people, which we call Realistic Image Primes for Experimental Research (RIPER). RIPER contains 249 images of individuals who are diverse along lines of gender, race, and occupational background. We standardize the images in RIPER by collecting ratings of their attractiveness, perceived race, and perceived income level. We make this diverse original database available as a useful tool for experimental social scientists.