Space, Electoral Geography, Inequality, and Representation
Winner of the 2023 Best Paper on American Political Economy Prize, APSA American Political Economy Section
Winner of the 2024 Lawrence Longley Award for Best Article, APSA Representation and Electoral Systems Section
Federalism and Social Policy
Measurement & Aggregation of Political Preferences
“Aggregation, Interpretation, and Estimation of Preferences in Conjoint Experiments” (with Scott Abramson, Korhan Kocak, and Anton Strezhnev). Under review.
Notes on Research (Micro and Macro)
When Do Local Interest Groups Participate in the Housing Entitlement Process?
with Michael Hankinson and Anna Weissman
Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2024 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
Abstract: Local governments control a hidden flow of economic goods that never appear on city budgets. Through the housing entitlement process, city officials may condition approval on the benefits developers provide to organized interests. But the politics and policies created by this discretionary review have yet to be studied through the lens of interest group mobilization. We bridge this gap with an analysis of the behavior of construction unions in the housing entitlement process. Using data from 164 U.S. cities, we find that construction union representatives are more likely to attend public meetings to advocate for favorable labor agreements when the expected profitability of new housing developments is high — and thus, when there are more particularistic benefits on the table. While interest group competition within local participatory institutions may signal a robust, pluralist democracy, it also risks driving up housing costs, to the detriment of both organized and unorganized residents.
Districting Without Parties: How City Council Maps Increase Minority Representation
with Michael Hankinson
Abstract: District elections have long been considered a tool for promoting minority representation in local government. But surprisingly little is understood about how electoral maps themselves shape political outcomes. We collect over one hundred new districting plans from cities across California that converted from at-large to district elections in the wake of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. Applying a state-of-the-art automated redistricting simulator, we find that most of these cities could not feasibly produce a plan with even one Latino-majority seat, though those that could generally tried to maximize this quantity. We introduce alternative metrics of descriptive representation that are tailored to a city’s political dynamics and risk tolerance around securing at least one Latino seat. Contrary to intuitions from partisan districting, we see no conflict between the goals of guaranteeing minimal representation and maximizing seats overall; rather, we find that concentrating Latinos within districts often achieves both goals and at no expense for Latinos’ substantive representation.
“The People’s Map,” adopted with broad consensus in Anaheim, California. The plan created three Latino “opportunity districts,” in which Latinos comprised 45-49% of the voting-eligible population. Alternative plans that could have been drawn in Anaheim would instead have concentrated Latino voters in two safer Latino-majority districts. Our paper presents a principled, data-driven approach for assessing which strategy will maximize minority electoral success.
An Agency Perspective on Immigration Federalism
All U.S. counties that have participated in the 287(g) program, with the most recent signings under the Trump Administration shown in orange.
Abstract: Over the past few decades, American local law enforcement agencies have engaged in an unprecedented degree of cooperation with the federal government to police immigration in the nation’s interior. I argue that this regime of “cooperative federalism” in immigration enforcement is an intentional and strategic use of the federal executive’s authority. Drawing insight from the bureaucratic agency literature, I develop a formal model that analyzes the president’s decision to invite subnational participation in policymaking. An empirical analysis of the 287(g) program highlights the model’s central trade-off: gains from cost-sharing versus losses from extremism. By deputizing local officers to act as federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, 287(g) induced a dramatic increase in immigration policing at little federal expense. But the localities that selected into the program were preference outliers who wielded their newfound agency differently from their federal counterparts: they escalated enforcement by aggressively policing misdemeanors, particularly traffic offenses.
This work was made possible by data and support from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
The Policy Adjacent: How Affordable Housing Generates Policy Feedback Among Neighboring Residents
with Michael Hankinson and Melissa Sands
A visualization of our research design: treated blocks — those that are near housing developments built in 2002-2006 — are drawn in red, and control blocks — those that are slightly farther — are drawn in black.
Abstract: While scholars have documented feedback effects among a policy’s direct winners and losers, less is known about whether such effects can occur among the indirectly affected — “the policy adjacent.” Using 458 geocoded housing developments built between two nearly identical statewide ballot propositions funding affordable housing in California, we show that policy generates feedback effects among neighboring residents in systematic ways. New, nearby affordable housing causes majority-homeowner blocks to increase their support for the housing bond, while majority-renter blocks decrease their support. We attribute the positive effect among homeowners to replacement of blight and improvement of property values. The negative effect among renters is driven by gentrifying neighborhoods. Not receiving an affordable housing unit despite their likely eligibility, these renters may attribute the new development to further increasing the rising rents around them. In turn, policy implementation can undermine support for expansion even among the policy’s intended beneficiaries.
Inaccuracies in Low Income Housing Geocodes: When and Why They Matter
with Nicole E. Wilson, Michael Hankinson, and Melissa Sands
Urban Affairs Review, 2024 [blog post] [paper] [appendix]
Abstract: Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time while Google-generated geocodes are almost always more accurate. However, while Google’s geolocation is more likely to be accurate, when it is inaccurate, it deviates from the true location by a much greater distance than HUD. We therefore recommend that scholars use Google-generated geocodes for most research applications where the localized environment matters; however, in studies where observations are aggregated to a larger area, researchers may prefer to use HUD geocodes, which are more frequently inaccurate but typically by smaller distances.
Detecting Preference Cycles in Forced-Choice Conjoint Experiments
with Scott Abramson, Korhan Kocak, and Anton Strezhnev
Abstract: In this paper we describe implications of an under-explored theoretical property of the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE): its violation of independence. We show how this results from the AMCE’s incorporation of information about irrelevant attributes by averaging over both direct and indirect comparisons of features. In doing so, the AMCE can impose an artificial transitivity and produce positive AMCEs even when respondents are less likely to choose a profile with one feature over the baseline in direct comparisons. We introduce an alternative estimand, the Average Feature Choice Probability (AFCP), which only considers direct comparisons and corresponds to the frequency an attribute is chosen in paired comparisons. We decompose the AMCE into a weighted average of AFCPs and we describe the necessary conditions under which a positive AMCE implies that an AFCP is greater than one-half. Finally, we develop a statistical test for the presence of preference intransitivities and illustrate our method with the reanalysis of a number of conjoint experiments.
Systemic Racism and Policing
Abstract: Concerns about racial bias in American policing have generated enormous scholarly literatures in political science, sociology, economics, statistics, criminology, social psychology, and law. The purpose of this review is to summarize the methodological and substantive knowledge these literatures have accumulated over the past two decades. Topics covered include how race shapes micro-level encounters between civilians and the police; the intersection between law enforcement and structural racism, including residential segregation and income inequality; the role of policing in a democratic society; and promising approaches to reduce racial harms. A key takeaway from this exercise is that the empirical study of racial bias in policing is not value-neutral: any approach requires the researcher to furnish a benchmark of no discrimination, inscribing (often unstated) standards of justice and fairness into the methodology. I propose avenues for future research for computational social scientists in light of my findings.
The Supply–Equity Trade-Off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply
with Michael Hankinson
Journal of Politics, 2023 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
Abstract: Institutions that structure representation have systematically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. We examine an understudied dimension of this problem: how local electoral rules shape the provision of collective goods in relation to racial groups. We leverage the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which compelled over one hundred cities to switch from at-large to district elections for city council, to causally identify how equalizing spatial representation changes the permitting of new housing. District elections decrease the supply of new multifamily housing, particularly in segregated cities with sizable and systematically underrepresented minority groups. But district elections also end the disproportionate channeling of new housing into minority neighborhoods. Together, our findings highlight a fundamental trade-off: at-large representation may facilitate the production of goods with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, but it does so by forcing less politically powerful constituencies to bear the brunt of those costs.
In Escondido, CA, the spatial distribution of new housing approved for construction went from being concentrated in one neighborhood before the reform to being spread equitably across the city afterward.
Income Inequality and Electoral Theories of Polarization
with Dan Alexander
Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2022 [paper] [appendix]
Abstract: Both the academic political science literature and the popular discourse are replete with narratives seeking to explain the concurrent rise of income inequality and legislative polarization over the past half century. We focus on a prominent subset of such accounts, which posit the faithful representation of polarizing constituencies as the key causal mechanism linking the two phenomena, and which we therefore refer to as “electoral theories of polarization.” We show, however, that constructing a coherent, causal electoral theory of polarization is substantially more complicated than the literature has appreciated. First, we enumerate the necessary ingredients, with special emphasis on the importance of accounting for electoral geography. Second, we develop a causal framework for assessing the effect of income on polarization via a particular electoral channel, and we propose a set of estimation strategies that researchers may tailor to their particular model of how legislative ideology and partisanship are (co)determined. Third, we apply our framework to evaluate how well a model of self-interested “pocketbook voting” can explain patterns of polarization on the economic dimension observed in the U.S. Senate from 1984 to 2018. We conclude that voters’ private benefit from redistribution is unlikely to be a mechanism linking inequality to polarization.
What Do We Learn About Voter Preferences From Conjoint Experiments?
with Scott Abramson and Korhan Kocak
American Journal of Political Science, 2022 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
Bounds on the proportion of survey respondents who prefer an attribute value grow as the number of possible profiles multiplies, quickly becoming too large to detect a majority preference. (AMCE = 0.05)
Abstract: Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this paper we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the AMCE, is not well-defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate-feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed.
At-Large Elections and Minority Representation in Local Government
with Carolyn Abott
American Journal of Political Science, 2020 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
Abstract: Despite a long history of legal challenges alleging that elections conducted at-large suppress minority representation, this remains the dominant electoral system in local governments throughout the United States. Moreover, a large empirical literature remains divided over the present-day impact of at-large elections on the political success of underrepresented groups. We reconcile the competing findings in this literature by providing contingent, causal estimates of the effect of conversion from at-large to ward elections on minority officeholding, using a novel identification strategy afforded by the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. We find a dramatic positive effect of conversion in districts where Latinos constitute a sufficiently large share of the voting population, and in large and residentially segregated districts. When these conditions are not satisfied, we consistently see null estimated effects.
Redistricting map for the city of Watsonville, CA, one of the first in the state to legally strike down at-large elections.
Financial Incentives in Vertical Diffusion: The Variable Effects of Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative on State Policy Making
with William Howell
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2019 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
We exploit the exogenous shock to states’ education budgets caused by the Great Recession to identify the effect of resources on vertical diffusion. Shown here is the Recession’s effect on unemployment and the associated change in states’ education budgets over the same period.
Abstract: A substantial body of empirical work documents the influence of federal monies on state policy making. Less attention, however, has been paid to the conditioning effects of states’ prior financial health. Nearly always, apportioned monies cover only a fraction of the costs of federal policy reforms. The capacity of states to deploy supplementary resources, therefore, may inform the willingness of states to comply with the federal government’s policy objectives. Focusing on Barack Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, we present new evidence that state responses to federal initiatives that carry financial rewards systematically vary with the amount of resources already on hand. States that survived the Great Recession with their education budgets largely intact, we find, tended to implement more RttT reforms overall, and especially more reforms that required substantial up-front financial commitments. These patterns of policy adoptions can be meaningfully attributed to RttT, are not the result of either prior or ancillary policy trends, and speak to the general importance of accounting for what states already have, above and beyond what the federal government is willing to offer, when studying the financial incentives of vertical diffusion.
Presidential Prescriptions for State Policy: Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative
with William Howell
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2017 [paper] [appendix] [replication file]
The proliferation of Race to the Top policies after the competition is announced in 2009.
Abstract: With increasing frequency, U.S. presidents have orchestrated relations between federal and state governments. A defining feature of this “executive federalism” is a pragmatic willingness to both borrow from and reconstitute very different types of past federalisms. A case in point is President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, which sought to stimulate the adoption of specific education reforms in state governments around the country through a series of highly prescriptive but entirely voluntary policy competitions. This paper evaluates the results of such efforts. To do so, it draws on four original data sets: a nationally representative survey of state legislators, an analysis of State of the State speeches, another of state applications to the competitions themselves, and finally, an inventory of state policymaking trends in a range of education policies that were awarded under the competition. This paper then relies upon a variety of identification strategies to gauge the influence of RttT on the nation’s education policy landscape. Taken as a whole the evidence suggests that RttT, through both direct and indirect means, augmented the production of state policies that were central components of the president’s education agenda.