Working Papers

“Old Money: Campaign Finance and Gerontocracy in the United States” with Adam Bonica (Revise & Resubmit, coverage in The New York Times, Factually! Podcast). Compared to those of other countries, politicians in the United States are among the oldest. We investigate the role of money in politics in maintaining age inequality in political influence and office-holding. Using record linkage, we create a novel dataset that combines administrative data on the age of voters, donors, and candidates. Descriptively, we find that the median dollar in the U.S. campaign finance system comes from a 66-year-old donor—significantly older than the median voter, candidate, or elected official—and that older donors are much more ideologically conservative than younger donors. We then investigate whether candidate age matters to donors. Results from within-district and within-donor analyses suggest that individuals are more likely to donate and donate more to candidates closer to their age. We conclude with a discussion of how various campaign finance policies might affect the age distribution of money in politics.

“The Insulation of Local Governance from Black Electoral Power: Northern Cities and the Great Migration” with Rob Mickey and Dan Ziblatt. Why has America’s democratization remained incomplete? Democratic institutions in the U.S. are highly decentralized, and lower level governments have the potential to counteract national level democratization. In this paper, we argue that, in response to the threat of growing Black electoral power resulting from the Great Migration, Northern cities moved to insulate governmental institutions from their diversifying electorates. Using a shift-share instrument, we find that greater migration of Black Americans from the South between 1940 and 1970 led cities to switch from mayor-council to city manager systems, shifting the administration of local governmental functions such as budgeting and the hiring of bureaucratic personnel in the office of an appointed manager. We then illustrate how the Great Migration shaped the decision of city elites to switch to city-manager government through a case study of Santa Monica, CA. Our findings show how, at a critical juncture in the course of the country’s national democratization, local governments acted to stymie it.

“Are Large Corporations Politically Moderate? Using Money in Politics to Infer the Preferences of Business” with Paul Pierson (coverage in The Guardian): The political preferences of business interests has been a topic of debate for decades. Recent measures of the political preferences of large corporations have focused on campaign contributions to legislative candidates from corporate political action committees (PACs). We investigate an alternative source of evidence: contributions to politically-engaged intermediary organizations. We argue that these expenditures—often substantially larger than traditional PAC expenditures—are important sources of information about corporate political preferences. Compared with traditional analyses, they suggest a corporate community that is both more conservative and more closely aligned with the Republican Party.

“When Governments Learn from Copartisans: Partisan Policy Diffusion” (winner of Best Paper in Public Policy at APSA 2018): Louis Brandeis' theory of states as laboratories of democracy suggests that governments engage in learning, emulating successful policies from other states and rejecting unsuccessful ones. However, Brandeis' theory did not address the role of parties. Politicians have incentives to avoid implementing successful outpartisan policies, as this may improve the outparty brand. Furthermore, organizations, such as party-aligned interest and expert groups that provide policymakers with information, may bias institutional learning against outpartisan policies. In turn, state governments may not converge on politically or economically successful policies. This article tests theories of partisan policy learning using a large dataset of policies in the U.S. states. Emulation of successful policies is more likely to occur between governments controlled by the same party. Consistent with the nationalization of party coalitions, success interacts more weakly with geography. The findings have implications for our understanding of the incentives of federalism in the context of partisan polarization.

Dormant Working Papers

“Testing City Limits: The Rise of Healthy San Francisco.” Dominant theories argue that cities have a hard time passing redistributive policies, so what explains the development of Healthy San Francisco, a local public health option and employer mandate to provide health care to uninsured workers?