Research & Publications

Replication materials and online appendices are linked with publications below. I'm still finalizing materials for forthcoming pieces. If you're looking for data/code not listed (typically older work), I am happy to share anything that's not built on proprietary data. Just email me at awood@law.usc.edu.  Thanks.

Publications (see citations on my Google Scholar page)

“Facebook Political Ads and Accountability: Outside Groups Are Most Negative, Especially When Hiding Donors or Disappearing” (with Shomik Jain), Forthcoming, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

“Decentralized Legislative Oversight of Bureaucratic Policy Making” (with Janna King and Sean Gailmard) Journal of Theoretical Politics. 2023.

Aneja, Abhay, Jacob M. Grumbach, and Abby K. Wood. 2022. “Financial Inclusion in Politics,” New York University Law Review

Feinstein, Brian and Abby K. Wood. 2022. “Divided Agencies,” Southern California Law Review

Abby K. Wood, Christopher Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer, and Nicolas Napolio. 2022. “Mind the (Participation) Gap: Vouchers, Voting, and Visibility”, American Politics Research 

Wood, Abby K. 2022. "Voters Learn from Campaign Finance Disclosure and Compliance Information".  Political Behavior..  Replication files here. Appendix here.

Aneja, Abhay, Jacob M. Grumbach, and Abby K. Wood. Forthcoming, 2022.  "Financial Inclusion in Politics".  NYU Law Review.

Feinstein, Brian, and Abby K. Wood. Forthcoming, 2022. "Divided Agencies". S. Cal. L. Rev. (lead article).

Wood, Abby and Christian Grose. 2021. Campaign Finance Transparency Affects Legislators' Election Outcomes and Behavior,  American Journal of Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12676 Replication files here.

Clouser McCann, Pamela J, Douglas M. Spencer, and Abby K. Wood. 2021. "Measuring State Capture."  Wisc. L. Rev.; online appendix (data and code coming soon)

Abby K. Wood. 2021.  “Learning from Campaign Finance Information.”  Emory Law Journal 70(5): 1091-1142. 

Abby K. Wood. 2020. “Facilitating Accountability for Online Political Advertisements.” Ohio State Technology Law Journal 16(2): 520-557.

Grose, Christian and Abby Wood. 2019. "Randomized experiments by government institutions and American political development." Public Choice 185, 401-413.

Stein, Robert, et al. 2019. "Waiting to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election: Evidence from a Multi-jurisdiction Study.”Political Research Quarterly, 73(2):439-453.

Stein, Robert, et al. 2019. “Polling Place Quality and Access” in The Future of Election Administration (Kathleen Hale and Bridgett  A. King, eds., Palgrave, 2019).

Abby K. Wood. 2018. “Campaign Finance Disclosure”. Annual Review of Law & Social Science 14(1): 11-27. 

Abby K. Wood and Ann M. Ravel. 2018. “Fool Me Once: Government Regulation of “Fake News” and other Online Political Advertising.” 91 Southern California Law Review 1223-1278.

Christopher S. Elmendorf & Abby K. Wood. 2018. "Elite Political Ignorance: Law, Data, and the Representation of (Mis)Perceived Electorates." 52 U.C. Davis Law Review 571-636 (lead article). 

Mann, Christopher B., et al. 2018. "Pedagogical Value of Polling Place Observation By Students." PS: Political Science & Politics (Oct) 831-837.

Wood, Abby K. and David E. Lewis. 2017. “Agency Performance Challenges and Agency Politicization” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 27(4): 581–595.   Supplemental appendix; data; code; codebook.

Michalski, Roger M. and Abby Wood. 2017. “Twombly and Iqbal at the State Level” (with Roger M. Michalski) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 14(2): 424-469.

Wood, Abby K. and Douglas M. Spencer. 2016. “In The Shadows of Sunlight: An Empirical Study of Campaign Finance Transparency” Election Law Journal 15(4): 302-329.

Jensenius, Francesca and Abby Wood. 2016. “Caught in the Act but not Punished: Why the Rule of Law is Key to Effective Deterrence” Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs. 686(4).

Spencer, Douglas M. and Abby K. Wood. 2014. “Citizens United, States Divided: Evidence of Elasticity in Independent Expenditures” Indiana Law Journal 89(1):315-372.

"Charm and Punishment: How the Philippines' leading man became its most famous prisoner", in Prosecuting Heads of State (Ellen Lutz and Caitlin Reiger, eds., Cambridge University, 2009)

Works In Progress

"Political Economy of Essential Work" with Pamela Clouser McCann. 

Risk reduction is a key aspect of our political economy. Elected officials, voters, private industry actors, and organized labor all take risk into consideration when forming policy preferences. Any policy decision can reallocate risk in a population. Gubernatorial decisions made during states of emergency -- which exist because of a risk to the state -- are no different. COVID-19 gave us a recent example of how emergency policy decisions allocate risk. Statewide mandates regarding private and public sector closures typically involved exceptions for workers deemed critical to public health and the safety of the community, including those individuals providing basic essential services such as healthcare, power, water, and sanitation services. Notably, the timing and content of gubernatorial orders and declarations varied across states, as did the essential worker exceptions. In this study, we argue that such gubernatorial choices are associated with the health and economic risks of their electoral constituents, along with the strength of governance institutions and political and economic landscape of the state.  We leverage variation in occupational exemptions in the executive orders along with timing of the orders to analyze state governments’ pandemic response. We find that the state's political economy is associated with the governors' responses to the COVID epidemic in predictable ways. 

This is part of a book-length project exploring risk, institutions, and political behavior.

“Race and Campaign Finance Deregulation” 

This is a book chapter that expands upon prior work that appeared in NYU Law Review, analyzing the racial wealth gap and campaign finance deregulation. This time, I set out a research agenda for studying whether and how gaps in our campaign finance disclosure regime affect racial and ethnic minorities, who are more likely to be targeted by political disinformation campaigns.

"Evaluating Institutions, Political Risk, and State Executive Behavior During Crisis" (with James Hendrickson and Pamela Clouser McCann)

Few major disasters in United States history have required all 50 state governors to engage their emergency powers simultaneously. The COVID-19 pandemic is one exception. It presents a unique opportunity for scholars to analyze the pressures and motivations behind executive decision-making during crisis. We examine the conditions under which a governor chooses to relinquish additional powers granted to them during states of emergency. Leveraging state institutional, health, and political data between 2/29/2020 to 6/15/2023, we find that when governors have strong emergency powers, increased institutional checks on ``fair weather'' governor power are associated with quicker entry into a state of emergency during the pandemic. We also find the political environment -- party of the governor, cross-branch pushback on executive authority, and divided government -- are associated with significant differences in the probability of being in a state of emergency when interacted with each other, holding levels of the COVID-19 crisis constant. Evaluations of how electoral risk and gubernatorial approval affect the decision to stay in a state of emergency are presently inconclusive, but hold promise for better understanding the interplay between election incentives, measures of approval, and responsiveness by governors. The project lays important groundwork in understanding how state executives decide whether and when to relinquish power in an emergency.

"Anger and Federalism: The Role of Emotions in Shaping COVID-19 Governance Preferences" (with Sophia Helland and Pamela Clouser McCann)

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, responsibilities for crisis management were dispersed throughout various agencies and levels of government. Voters had preferences over which level of government should take primary responsibility over responding to the pandemic. Emotions impact voter motivations, and these emotions may be tied to voter gender and other attributes. Utilizing data from a unique module in the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, we explore the role of partisanship and emotions in shaping federalism preferences and venue preferences. We find that federalism preferences are highly motivated by partisanship. Anger toward the federal government, particularly among Democrats, was a strongly associated with stronger preferences for state control. We also find that anger and worry toward the federal government drove venue preferences within the federal government toward favoring health administrative agencies as the venue for COVID policy. Finally, while women expressed more anger than men, this difference did not translate into gendered differences for federalism or venue preferences.