Criminal Justice Contact and Political Participation: Evidence from North Carolina, with Taylor Landon
Job Market Paper
Political institutions shape how individuals experience and view government, and for many disadvantaged communities, the criminal justice system is their most direct point of contact with the state. This paper examines how interactions with the criminal justice system affect political participation for defendants and their families. We link administrative data on North Carolina criminal court cases to statewide voter history from 2007–2019 and estimate the causal effects of charges, convictions, and incarceration on voter turnout. Using a regression discontinuity design around election dates and an instrumental variables approach based on quasi-random judge assignment, we show that the timing and outcome of criminal justice contact meaningfully affect voter turnout. Being charged just before an election reduces turnout, especially when cases are not dismissed, while noncarceral conviction modestly increases participation, and incarceration sharply decreases it. We also find evidence of spillovers to family members, particularly Black women, whose turnout declines when a relative is charged. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately concentrated among disadvantaged groups, these interactions not only influence electoral participation but may also shape trust in government programs more broadly, amplifying existing inequalities.
Working Papers
Does Power Beget Power for Radical Parties? Evidence from municipal council elections, submitted
In recent decades, radical parties have gained prominence in Europe and Latin America. These parties often adopt policies that depart from the mainstream economic consensus and may threaten democratic institutions. In this paper, I explore the role that being elected plays in the success of far-right and far-left parties. Using data from municipal council elections in Colombia, Sweden, Finland, Spain, and Brazil, I find that radical parties, on average, enjoy an incumbency advantage comparable to that of nonradical parties. There is substantial variation, particularly between far-right parties in Sweden and Colombia. Two factors contribute to this disparity: the Sweden Democrats’ exclusion from governing coalitions in municipal councils and the absence of an effect of incumbency on the probability of a party running again in Sweden. These findings suggest that the normal course of the democratic process may lead to radical parties encroaching on positions of power.
The Intergenerational Effect of Going to War on Enlistment: Evidence from the World War I Draft
How does war affect the long-term outcomes of soldiers and their children? While there is ample evidence on the effects of enlistment on labor market outcomes, less is known about its causal effect on the likelihood that veterans’ descendants will participate in subsequent wars. In general, children of veterans are more likely than those of nonveterans to enlist in the military, although this correlation may not reflect a causal relationship. In this paper, I exploit age-based eligibility criteria for enlistment during World War I to study its effect on the probability that veterans’ children enlisted in World War II. To identify World War II veterans, I use data from Censoc, which standardizes and cleans bulk Army Enlistment Records made available online by the National Archives. I link individuals in the Censoc dataset to their parents using full-count Census records. I find no evidence that children of World War I veterans were more likely to volunteer for service in World War II. I suggest that this may be due to the absence of economic impacts on veterans’ children's outcomes. This finding indicates that cultural transmission alone does not increase military participation among veterans’ children; rather, in the absence of economic effects, war does not affect the likelihood of participation in future conflicts among veterans’ offspring.
I study the effect of racial unrest on campaign contributions and how this effect is mediated by media coverage. Using a regression discontinuity in time, I find that political donations increased after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Exploiting discontinuities in media market borders in the United States I find that counties that were more exposed to coverage of the protests by a TV station owned by Sinclair, a conservative media conglomerate, were less likely to support Republican candidates. I provide suggestive evidence that this non-intuitive result could be the consequence of higher coverage of protests by Sinclair-owned TV stations when compared to other TV stations. By rising salience of the issue of racial tensions where Democrats were more trusted than Republicans, this increased media coverage may have depressed donations to the Republican party. I also report suggestive evidence that in counties exposed to more TV ads about police brutality there was higher support for the Democratic party than in less exposed counties.
Playing Both Sides in an Era of Increasing Polarization: the Surprising Bipartisanship of PAC Contributions, with Ethan Kaplan, Andrew Sweeting, and Yidan Xu
We measure and decompose the partisanship of campaign contributions by corporate PACs from 1990 to 2020 using a variance index approach. We find that, in aggregate and across most sectors of the economy, PACs have donated to candidates from both major parties. We contrast this result with a similar variance decomposition for individual donors. Individuals' contributions are, unsurprisingly, partisan throughout the period, although we also observe increasing partisanship in the giving of the largest donors in the 2020 election. Whereas most of the variance in corporate giving is within PACs, most of the variance in individual giving is across individuals.
Work in Progress
Dark Money, Independent Expenditures, and Extremism