Research

Academic

"How Partisan is Local Election Administration?" with Joshua Ferrer and Daniel M. Thompson. Published at the American Political Science Review (APSR).

In the US, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an edge in elections? Using a newly collected dataset of nearly 5,900 clerk elections and a close-election regression discontinuity design, we compare counties that narrowly elect a Democratic election administrator to those that narrowly elect a Republican. We find that Democrats and Republicans serving equivalent counties oversee similar election results, turnout, and policies. We also find that reelection is not the primary moderating force on clerks. Instead, clerks may be more likely to agree on election policies across parties than the general public and selecting different election policies may only modestly affect outcomes. While we cannot rule out small effects that nevertheless tip close elections, our results imply that clerks are not typically and noticeably advantaging their preferred party. 

Published version available here:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-partisan-is-local-election-administration/956E3FE5025E561198043C2E9B5E09C0. 

Working paper on the effect of financial aid for college attendance and political participation. Draft available here (external link).

With Daniel Firoozi, we come up with causally valid estimates of the effect of education on voter turnout, donation to political campaigns, and other measures of political participation. The main approach is a regression discontinuity (RD) design on administrative data on nearly 16 million applicants to the Cal Grant program in California. Leveraging as-if random assignment of Cal Grant receipt, we estimate the effect of enrolling in a California higher ed institution (UC, CSU, private college, trade school, etc.) on the aforementioned outcomes. We also offer evidence about colleges' effect on applicants' political affiliation and provide suggestive analyses about the mechanisms that undergird these effects. Draft available upon request.

• Awarded a summer research award from the California Policy Lab (CPL) (Summer 2022).

• Presented at Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Annual Meeting, 2023.

How politically biased is U.S. federal disaster spending? Draft in-progress.

Does copartisanship between executive-level politicians (particularly, the President of the United States) and members of Congress produce political bias in disaster funding? Existing work suggests bias in Presidents’ decisions to declare disasters at the county level, but scholars have not credibly examined whether copartisanship is also associated with bias in downstream measures (e.g., funding). I study this question using a regression discontinuity (RD) design where as-if random assignment of party at the Congressional district-year level determines copartisanship with the President. Looking across all disasters that received FEMA funding between 1990 and 2022, I find that, while there is a substantial and statistically significant effect of electing a copartisan on disaster relief funding, this effect is negative across several specifications and depending on modeling choices. Preliminary heterogeneity analyses examine when the bias is more or less likely to occur, looking across Presidential terms, party, and timing (i.e. early or later in a President’s tenure) as well as across disaster type and other measures.

• Accepted at Southern Political Science Association (SPSA) Annual Meeting, 2023.

Book chapter on elected local election officials.

WIth Joshua Ferrer, we examine the current state and some historical details of election administration in the U.S., which is to say local election administration in the U.S. We characterize states--and, where relevant, municipalities--in terms of various election administration characteristics, including who holds final authority, how many individuals are tasked with responsibility for overseeing elections, nuances of jurisdictions with shared power, and so on.  We also describe various personal characteristics of local election officials, for example finding that they are on average older and more likely to identify as white. This chapter is scheduled for publication in a text with Palgrave Macmillan. 

Draft available here: https://www.joshuaferrer.com/publication/electing_americas_election_officials/electing_americas_election_officials.pdf.

Do voters hold school board officials accountable?

Abstract

Past scholarship on disparities in education outcomes has done much to uncover the mechanisms through which disparities in education arise and continue. Some show that a lack of racial representation in a district's electorate is positively associated with the racial achievement gap. In a different but related literature, scholars find a similar positive association between segregation of schools within a district and district-level achievement gaps between racial groups, also adding the potential mechanism of concentration in high-poverty districts. However, while it is descriptively true that income, parental education, and other socioeconomic factors are predictors of students' educational success, some districts shrink achievement gaps between certain groups over time while others shrink these gaps less or actually exacerbate them (even when looking at changes in ceteris paribus districts across time). This is unsurprising given that we expect school board officials (SBOs) to exercise control and pull policy levers that instantiate changes in the educational outcomes of the students in their districts; after all, SBOs are among the highest paid public officials in local government. Do voters hold SBOs accountable for education outcomes -- overall test scores, learning rates, racial achievement gaps, and more -- through a theoretically consistent mechanism such as selection or sanction (i.e. reward/punish)?

Notes

• Awarded summer research funding from the UCLA Department of Political Science (Summer 2021).

Do political institutions influence voters' policy knowledge?

Abstract

TBD.