Research

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón. Redistributive place-based policies and support for government in the EU Working paper

We study the political effects that the EU’s regional policy has had over the last thirty years. Regional or cohesion policy is one of the largest spending items from the European Union and the largest and long-run example of place-based policies in democratic contexts. They are targeted at the development of regions left behind economically by EU economic integration and de-industrialization. One may expect that voters in places that receive greater EU funding would be be more supportive of the incumbent national parties, and of the European Union itself. However, disappointing performance of government funding in changing the trajectory of these regions may lead to null or even negative effects on support for incumbents and pro-EU parties, that is, an increase in government contestation. Assessing vote for different party types in a panel of national parliamentary elections, we find that greater regional spending in EU funds is associated with less support for incumbents and pro EU parties. These results are consistent in both two-way fixed effect models and a regression discontinuity design that leverages eligibility rules for cohesion funds. We find that part of this effect is explained by differences in the perceived quality of government regionally. This suggests that voters in areas facing economic challenges and who receive redistributive government spending may be activated to contest governments when witnessing ineffective spending that does lead to regional solutions to their challenges.

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón and Paul E. Peterson. Do we need more adults in U. S. school districts? Achievement Effects of Increases in Teachers, Paraprofessionals, and Non-Teaching Staff 

Some theorists of public administration say public services are delivered more effi- ciently when government jurisdictions consolidate, but organizational theorists expect returns to diminish as personnel increases in density or size. Empirical findings are scattered and inconsistent. In the first plausibly causal analysis of density and size effects that makes use of state representative data of the National Assessment of Ed- ucational Progress (NAEP), we estimate effects of changes in personnel density on biennial changes in 8th grade reading and math performances between 2003 and 2022. Models employ district fixed effects and state-by-wave fixed effects to estimate impacts of marginal shifts in the density of teaching, paraprofessional and non-teaching staff. No significant impacts are detected overall, but important heterogeneities are observed. Positive academic impacts are detected for districts below the median in enrollment size, but negative impacts are observed in above-median districts. Similarly adverse effects are detected in the most dense quartile. Disproportionately adverse effects are observed for black and low-income students in large districts, but positive ones are detected for Hispanic students. Salary increases have small positive effects for students who report their parents have received a four-year college degree. Findings are attributed to loosely coupled organizations.

Daniel J. Flynn and Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón. How skills and motivations affect digital literacy: Experimental evidence from Spanish teens

Adolescents often struggle to evaluate the reliability of online content about politics, health, and other important issues. Integrating research on political knowledge and educational psychology, we develop a theory to explain how skills and motivations interact to shape digital literacy among adolescents. We test the theory with a preregistered experiment conducted on a national sample of teenagers in Spain. The experiment randomizes exposure to a skills-enhancing treatment and an individualized motivational prime that accentuates public or private risks of misinformation. Descriptively, we find that two-thirds of teens overestimate their ability to discern fake news --- a tendency that exists across demographic and political subgroups. Experimental results demonstrate that skills training improves fake news discernment \emph{only} when paired with a motivational prime. By contrast, skills training and motivational primes are ineffective or counterproductive when delivered alone. We discuss implications for misinformation research and the design of future interventions. 

Emmerich Davies, Thomas Gift, Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón. Global Performance Assessments and Domestic Demands for Spending and Reform. Submitted

Recent years have seen a boom in the use and visibility of Global Performance Assessments (GPAs), which rate policy outcomes across diverse areas based on internationally-benchmarked data. In uncertain policy spaces, GPAs provide consistent standards and metrics that countries must adhere to score highly, and this may lead policymakers to reforms that achieve improvements.Although scholars have speculated that GPAs may raise aggregate demands for different types of policy reform, research has largely neglected the first step of whether GPAs shape domestic public opinion and, if so, how. Looking at a paradigmatic case of GPAs in education (PISA data),  we theorize that international comparisons will be perceived as more relevant by more globally exposed citizns.  we leverage three different survey experiments to test the relation between integration into global markets and demand for policy reform, and the extent to which it is mediated by data from international exams. In the first study, we use a representative sample of one of the US states with the greatest variation in economic and labor market globalization (Massachusetts). We find that self-perceived exposure to globalization and GPA information both independently drive the assessment of local schools and on the demand for education reform but that the effect of information does not vary by level of globalization exposure. In the second study, we use a nationally representative sample of the US population to test the effects of an information treatment that provides a vignette with information on GPA-like local student performance. We find in that case some evidence for the interaction between GPA information and exposure to globalization (via the ``China shock’’), particularly for a specific type of education reform (charters). In the third study, we use a convenience sample of US adults to validate these results and to test whether effects of priming with GPA data vary with different perceptions of the effects of globalization, some of which may make the need for skill development more salient. We cross-randomize the GPA data prime with prompts about concerns about immigration, the offshoring of economic production and the effects of technological change. We find that GPA information is most strongly associated with support for education reform among those primed to think about the offshoring of production.Our project complements a mounting set of studies on how GPAs influence policy reform, with a novel experimental strategy focused on public opinion. We suggest in a discussion that effects on the public are dependent on the types of education reform and the types of globalization considered. We also find that the public is already fairly well informed about performance (at least in education) and propose an understudied mechanism of GPA dissemination is not about the generation of new information, but on the saliency of particular policy domains.

Thomas Gift and Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón. Speaking with the Enemy: Politician Media Choices and Voter Evaluations. Submitted

Why do many politicians refuse to appear on out-partisan media, despite the opportunity it presents to reach (and potentially persuade) more voters? Our answer is that, even if audiences splinter along party lines, ``crossover'' viewing is common, and voters who watch out-partisan outlets may (or may not) like politicians ``speaking with the enemy.'' We develop a formal model establishing that candidates who appear on uncongenial media with an accommodating approach will appeal to ``soft'' out-partisans, but alienate ``hard'' in-partisans. Candidates who take an adversarial approach will appeal to ``hard'' in-partisans, but alienate soft ``out-partisans.'' To test our theory, we propose three preregistered, nationally-representative survey experiments in the U.S. that randomly manipulate images of politicians shown on Fox News or MSNBC, as well as public statements made about the networks. Our study adds to research on media and partisan polarization by endogenizing the choice of politicians to interface with diverse constituencies. 

Thomas Gift and Carlos Lastra-Anadón Can Politicians Say That?
What Shapes Public Responses to Speech Scandals

Forthcoming at the Journal of Experimental Political Science. Preprint

Why do some politicians face greater backlash for using insensitive language against identity groups while others do not? Existing explanations focus either on the content of speech or the context in which it occurs. In this article, we pro- pose an integrated framework that considers both and test it using a preregistered conjoint survey on a national U.S. sample. Our findings provide partial support for our expectations. Subjects react most negatively to insensitive speech when the target belongs to their own identity group, when aggravating circumstances exist, and when politicians are of an opposing political party. Our article extends growing scholarship on speech scandals, which has largely explained the fates of politicians as a function of a small number of causative variables in isolation.

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón, Kenneth Scheve, David Stasavage. Learning to love government? Technological Change and the Political Economy of Higher Education. Publisher's version

The Journal of Politics, Volume 87, Number 1, January 2025

Why do voters have divergent beliefs about the role of government in solving social problems? We study this question in the context of skill-biased technological change and investment in higher education. We document that the negative income consequences of technological change are, descriptively, mitigated in US counties with greater levels of higher education investment. We show that exposure to these conditions of greater investment is, in turn, correlated with more public support for higher education spending. We conclude that higher education investments are productive. However, we also find evidence consistent with the idea that whether people in a community learn the benefits of higher education spending depends on what they believed to begin with. Learning is history dependent. In a context where higher education spending dampens the negative employment effects of technological change, a history of believing that education is productive may advantage local communities in learning the true productivity of higher education investments.

Thomas Gift and Carlos Lastra-Anadón “ ‘Deservingness’ of Beneficiaries and Support for Universal Public Services: A Survey Experiment on the UK's National Health Service”. Public Opinion Quarterly 87.1 (2023): 44-68. Publisher's version

Voters support less spending on means-tested entitlements when they perceive beneficiaries as lacking motivation to work and pay taxes. Yet do concerns about the motivations of “unde- serving” beneficiaries also extend to universal public goods (UPGs) that are free and available to all citizens? Lower spending on UPGs poses a particular trade-off: It lessens subsidization of “unmotivated” beneficiaries, but at the expense of reducing the ideal levels of UPGs that voters personally can access. Studies suggest that individuals will sacrifice their preferred amounts of public goods when beneficiaries who do not pay taxes try to access these goods, but it is unclear whether they distinguish based on motivations. To analyze this question, we field a nationally- representative survey experiment in the UK that randomly activates some respondents to think about users of the country’s universal National Health Service as either “motivated” or “unmotivated” non-contributors. Although effect sizes were modest and spending preferences remained high across-the-board, results show that respondents support the least spending on the NHS when activated to think of users as “unmotivated” non-contributors. These findings suggest how the deservingness heuristic may shape public attitudes toward government spending, regardless of whether benefits are targeted or universal.

Carlos Lastra-Anadon and Paul E. Peterson. “The Efficiency-Equity Trade-off in a Federal System: Local Financing of Schools and Student Achievement”. Publius: The Journal of Federalism 53.2 (2023): 174-200. Publisher's version

Federalism theorists debate the desirability of funding local services from local revenues or inter-governmental grants. Tiebout expects efficiency gains from local funding, but Oates says it perpetuates inequalities. Research using data from national probability samples has yet to show whether efficiency-equity trade-offs are associated with funding sources. We describe the trade-off in education by estimating the effect of revenue share from local sources on math and reading achievement. Data come from national probability samples of student performances on tests administered between 1990 and 2017. Relationships are estimated with OLS descriptive models, event study models of school finance reforms, and geographic discontinuity models that exploit differences in state funding policies. For every ten-percentage point increase in local revenue share, mean achievement rises by 0.05 standard deviations (sd) and socio-economic achievement gaps widen by 0.03sd. Voice and exit channels moderate the size of the efficiency-equity trade-off. Implications for inter-governmental grant policy are discussed.

Thomas Gift and Carlos Lastra-Anadon. Forthcoming. “Perceived Beneficiaries and Support for the Globalization of Higher Education: A Survey Experiment on Attitudes toward International Students.” Political Science Research and Methods. 11:2 (2023): 374 - 383.

Foreign students are one of the most significant immigrant categories in many North American and Western European countries. Yet as their numbers have swelled, many governments have experienced increasing pressures to cap their entry. This is true despite the sizable benefits that foreign students bring to host countries, and despite standard political economy concerns about immigrants—that they take away jobs or abuse public entitlements—not applying to foreign students. We field a nationally-representative survey experiment in the U.K., one of the top destinations for foreign students, to examine potential activators of public support for capping the number of foreign students. Results show that support for caps is most activated when citizens are primed to think about foreign students competing with domestic students for scarce admissions slots at universities.

Leslie Finger and Carlos Lastra-Anadon. 2022. “Advocates For Hire: How Government Contracting Shapes Politics .” Governance, 35, 1, Pp. 187-208

Many public services in the U.S. are administered through non-state actors, many of which are nonprofits with broad social missions. Some scholars show that contracting these organizations can compromise their broader goals and political activities, while others find that such arrangements empower the organizations to engage in advocacy and influence policy. We argue that not only can contracting strengthen nonprofits’ capacity to engage in politics and advance their missions, but it can mobilize political activity among those working for and engaging with the nonprofit. We use the case of Teach For America (TFA) and an instrumental variable approach that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of TFA’s arrival in states to show that contracting TFA is related with the arrival of new education reform advocacy groups spearheaded by TFA alumni. This, in addition to TFA’s direct efforts, leads to the passage of reform policies - especially charter school laws.

Renzhe Yu, Subhro Das, Sairam Gurajada, Kush Varshney, Hari Raghavan, and Carlos Lastra-Anadon. 2021. “A Research Framework for Understanding Education-Occupation Alignment with NLP Techniques.” In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, Pp. 100–106. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics. Publisher's Version

Understanding the gaps between job requirements and university curricula is crucial for improving student success and institutional effectiveness in higher education. In this context, natural language processing (NLP) can be leveraged to generate granular insights into where the gaps are and how they change. This paper proposes a three-dimensional research framework that combines NLP techniques with economic and educational research to quantify the alignment between course syllabi and job postings. We elaborate on key technical details of the framework and further discuss its potential positive impacts on practice, including unveiling the inequalities in and long-term consequences of education-occupation alignment to inform policymakers, and fostering information systems to support students, institutions and employers in the school-to-work pipeline.

Emmerich Davies, Thomas Gift, and Carlos Lastra-Anadón. 2020. “How global performance assessments shape attitudes toward government decision-making: Survey experimental evidence .” Governance. Publisher's Version

Global Performance Assessments (GPAs), which rank countries on a range of policy areas, can encourage domestic demands for policy reform. Yet can they also affect at what level of government—local or national— citizens want reform to take place? We theorize that, by emphasizing how countries fare relative to others, GPAs prompt citizens to view domestic policy underperformance as a “national problem requiring national solutions.” This increases calls for vesting pol- icymaking authority in the hands of central govern- ments. We argue that this effect should be most salient when underperformance is presented as a threat to a country's security because it induces citizens to “rally ‘round the flag.” To test our theory, we field an original survey experiment in the United States using fictitious news articles manipulating both the source of perfor- mance monitoring information and how it is presented. In line with our prediction, respondents are most likely to demand policy centralization when underperformance is framed using GPAs and citizens are primed to think of low scores as a threat to their country's security. These results indicate that GPAs could eventually increase calls for expanding the purview of national-level politicians over policymaking.

Susana Cordeiro Guerra and Carlos Lastra-Anadón. 2019. “The quality-access tradeoff in decentralizing public services: Evidence from education in the OECD and Spain.” Journal of Comparative Economics.

Decentralized delivery of public services should enhance constituents’ ability to hold politicians accountable and improve public service outcomes, according to theory. Yet, decentralization has not consistently yielded those improvements. This paper uses a novel cross-country panel from the OECD to show that decentralization generally improves students’ access to education, but in so doing, it creates congestion effects which diminish the overall quality of education that students receive. We argue that this is partially explained by the incentives of sub-central governments upon receiving their new authority. Sub-central governments are more incentivized than national ones to pursue policy improvements that are more visible and quicker to achieve, even when they are costly – like improving access – over improvements that are less visible and take longer to achieve – like increasing quality. Decentralization should therefore result in positive effects on education access and negative on quality, consistent with our findings. We directly test the impact of political incentives on responses to decentralization by exploiting the timing of education decentralization in Spain (1980–99), and variation in the political assertiveness of regional governments, using generalized difference-in-differences and synthetic controls. As predicted, the magnitude of decentralization's effects is greater for assertive regions, which are most incentivized to prioritize high visibility, costly policies.

Thomas Gift and Carlos Lastra-Anadón. 2018. “How voters assess elite-educated politicians: A survey experiment.” Electoral Studies, 56, Pp. 136-149. Publisher's Version

Are politicians with elite backgrounds more electable? In this article, we test whether being an elite is a net positive or negative in running for public o ce via an original survey experiment that manipulates one of the most salient indicators of eliteness in American life: university education. We nd that liberals, but not con- servatives, perceive politicians who attended elite schools to be more competent. Meanwhile, conservatives, but not liberals, perceive politicians who attended elite schools to be less relatable. On average, citizens are mildly, but not signi cantly, less inclined to vote for elite-educated politicians. By embedding treatments in our survey for whether politicians came from advantaged or disadvantaged upbringings, we also con rm that our results do not entirely re ect generic attitudes toward economically privileged candidates.