Research
Peer-reviewed publications
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Aggregation, Interpretation, and Estimation of Preferences in Conjoint Experiments
Preprint
Abstract
Conjoint experiments are widely used to study preferences in multidimensional choice settings. Commonly reported estimands in this literature summarize a feature’s average performance against the full field of alternatives induced by the design, aggregating direct comparisons between the two feature levels of interest together with indirect comparisons involving other levels of the same attribute. Yet researchers’ substantive questions often concern binary preference relations — whether respondents prefer feature A to feature B. These are distinct quantities, and we show that they can diverge when there are preference cycles: a feature may perform better against the field while losing in the direct comparison. We introduce a new estimand, the average feature choice probability (AFCP), that directly targets the binary preference relation; decompose widely used estimands into weighted averages of such pairwise comparisons; and develop statistical tools that diagnose divergence between binary preference relations and “against-the-field” estimands.
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Reform Drift: How Incumbent Protection Undermines Descriptive Representation in Local Government
Preprint
Abstract
Institutional reforms designed to enhance democratic representation often place implementation in the hands of incumbents. We examine how incumbents use this control to protect their interests by leveraging the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which prompted hundreds of jurisdictions to switch from at-large to district elections to improve minority representation. Using a state-of-the-art redistricting simulation algorithm, we show that adopted city council maps overwhelmingly placed incumbents alone in their districts — 57% of cities’ plans ranked in the 99th percentile or higher for avoidance of incumbent pairings. This pattern was especially pronounced in smaller, whiter cities with lower turnout and more competitive elections. Crucially, incumbent protection deters challenger entry and reduces Latino electoral success. In Latino-opportunity districts, a lone incumbent decreases the probability of a Latino being elected by 17 percentage points. Our findings show how reforms can be blunted by those empowered to implement them, ultimately reinforcing existing power structures.
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An Agency Perspective on Immigration Federalism
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Appendix
Replication
Podcast
Abstract
American local law enforcement agencies now engage 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. By deputizing local officers with the powers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, 287(g) allowed willing local participants to share the costs of enforcement with federal authorities. But the localities that selected into the program were preference outliers who wielded their newfound agency differently from their federal counterparts: Rather than using the immigration system to help police felonies, they deployed the criminal justice system to police immigration.
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The Policy Adjacent: How Affordable Housing Generates Policy Feedback Among Neighboring Residents
Winner, 2023 Best Paper on American Political Economy Award, APSA American Political Economy Section
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Appendix
Replication
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 or do not change their support. We attribute the positive effect among majority-homeowner blocks to the housing’s replacement of blight. In contrast, the lack of a positive effect among majority-renter blocks may be driven by the threat of gentrification. Policy implementation can win support for expansion among unexpected beneficiaries, while failing to do so even among the policy’s presumed allies.
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When Do Local Interest Groups Participate in the Housing Entitlement Process?
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Appendix
Replication
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.
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Inaccuracies in Low Income Housing Geocodes: When and Why They Matter
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Appendix
Replication
Blog post
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.
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The Supply–Equity Trade-Off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply
Winner, 2024 Lawrence Longley Award, APSA Representation and Electoral Systems Section
PDF
Appendix
Replication
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 100 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.
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Income Inequality and Electoral Theories of Polarization
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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.
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What Do We Learn About Voter Preferences from Conjoint Experiments?
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Appendix
Replication
Abstract
Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (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.
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At-Large Elections and Minority Representation in Local Government
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Appendix
Replication
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.
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Financial Incentives in Vertical Diffusion: The Variable Effects of Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative on State Policy Making
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Appendix
Replication
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.
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Presidential Prescriptions for State Policy: Obama’s Race to the Top Initiative
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Appendix
Replication
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.
Working papers
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The Shape of Democracy: Jurisdiction Boundaries and the Siting of Renewable Energy Infrastructure
Working paper
Abstract
Political science has long studied how the size and shape of jurisdictions influence representation and governance, but much less is known about their effects on policy outcomes. This paper addresses that gap by examining how local jurisdictional structure shapes the siting of wind turbines — a critical challenge for the green energy transition. We develop a theoretical model which predicts how the geographical distribution of voters within local jurisdictions influences the siting of wind turbines. Using data on all Danish wind turbines built between 2007 and 2021, and exploiting Denmark’s 2007 municipal reform, which changed local boundaries while leaving the landscape unchanged, we show that shifts in local electorates strongly affect turbine siting. These results highlight how the political geography of local governments shapes renewable energy deployment, raising concerns about equity, efficiency, and democratic legitimacy in decentralized climate policy.
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How Responsive Is Local Immigration Enforcement to Constituency Preferences?
Working paper
Abstract
An important gap in the scholarship on democratic responsiveness in U.S. local politics concerns the office of county sheriff: a powerful decisionmaker that has recently stepped onto the front lines of immigration enforcement. Despite being elected in most jurisdictions, sheriffs operate in an unusually low-turnout, uncompetitive setting. Our study is the first comprehensive, nationwide assessment of how electoral incentives shape sheriffs’ responsiveness to their constituencies’ immigration preferences. First, we produce a new county-level panel dataset of ideal points capturing immigration restrictionism by race/ethnicity and education. Then, we assess how these preferences shape local immigration enforcement outcomes, finding persistent evidence that sheriffs are responsive mainly to their white constituents, but not to other groups. Furthermore, institutional reforms to increase turnout and competition are not likely to break this deeply entrenched equilibrium of selective accountability: on-cycle elections only widen the gap in responsiveness to white versus Hispanic constituents.
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Assessing District Elections as a Remedy in State Voting Rights Acts
Working paper
Abstract
As federal voting rights protections recede, state-level voting rights acts (VRAs) have become the principal legal tool for safeguarding minority representation in the United States. We assess what these laws can accomplish using the California Voting Rights Act, which has compelled over 150 cities to replace at-large with district elections. Applying redistricting algorithms across 109 cities, we evaluate how much district elections — and the alternative reforms state VRAs permit — can amplify Latino political influence. District elections prove to be a limited remedy: most cities cannot draw a majority-Latino district and many cannot use districts to meaningfully increase Latino electoral success, even under optimistic assumptions about turnout, cohesion, and crossover voting. By contrast, cumulative voting, ranked choice voting, and limited voting empower Latino voters without relying on favorable geography or mapmakers’ discretion. We conclude that policymakers seeking to improve minority representation should be more open to reforms within the proportional representation family.
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Causal Attribution in Conjoint Experiments
Working paper
Abstract
Researchers often rely on conjoint analysis to understand which attributes drive respondents’ decisionmaking, yet standard estimands are not designed to measure attribute relevance. We introduce a novel approach to measuring attribute relevance in conjoint analysis by drawing on causal attribution methods. Our proposed estimand, the average probability of necessary and sufficient causation (APNS), captures the probability that swapping two profiles’ levels on an attribute would change a respondent’s choice. We establish nonparametric identification under assumptions related to preference heterogeneity, and provide simple difference-in-means estimators that can be applied to existing conjoint data structures. Two empirical applications illustrate the method. A candidate choice experiment in Germany reveals significant preference heterogeneity that leads standard estimands to mask relevance, while under the right assumptions the APNS recovers it. By contrast, in a replication of a prominent refugee experiment, we find that assuming preference homogeneity is unproblematic for many attributes of asylum-seekers.