Working Papers

“Old Money: Campaign Finance and Gerontocracy in the United States” with Adam Bonica (under review). 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.

“Improving Compliance in Experimental Studies of Discrimination” with Aaron Kaufman and Chris Celaya (under review). In experimental studies of discrimination, researchers often manipulate cues of social identity to isolate their discriminatory effects, holding all else constant. These studies are influential in public discourse and commonly cited in crafting anti-discrimination policy. We argue that the experimental manipulations common in these studies are prone to noncompliance: respondents do not observe, acknowledge, or update their beliefs about the social identities signaled. Focusing on experiments addressing racial discrimination, we find evidence that racialized name cues suffer from compliance as low as 33%, especially for Black treatments. Adding pre-tested racialized pictures and resumé items improves compliance to 95% on average and reduces the variance in compliance across races. Our simulation studies show that this noncompliance tends to attenuate the estimated effects of race by as much as 85%, implying that racial discrimination may be much deeper than decades of experiments have suggested.

“The Political Effects of Affirmative Action: Evidence from Court Mandates on Law Enforcement Agencies” with Abhay Aneja (under review). Affirmative action policies are considered a canonical example of a civil rights policy that generated a political backlash, increasing white support for the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. However, there has been little empirical assessment of this claim. It may instead be the case that affirmative action increased the political empowerment of African Americans and racial liberalism of among voters. Exploiting the timing of affirmative action enforcement on police departments in U.S. counties, difference-in-differences results show a robust positive effect of affirmative action on Democratic vote shares. However, we also find that the policy enforcement led to the flight of white residents from covered counties, which likely explains some but not all of the increase in Democratic vote shares. The results call into question the traditional historical narrative that affirmative action was politically counterproductive in the post-civil rights era.

“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?