Research

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South. We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Blacks for the use of the carceral state—police, the courts, and the prison system. We study the extent to which White Southern elites turned to the carceral state as a tool of Black political suppression when the VRA rendered Jim Crow policies unusable. To systematically test this, use new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (∼1940-1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered, and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters. Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks—and finds—other outlets of social and political control.

We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator – which we term Partisan Dislocation – is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter’s geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show that our measure is a good local and global indicator of district manipulation, easily identifying instances in which districts carve up clusters of co-partisans (cracking) or combine them in unnatural ways (packing). We demonstrate that our measure is related to but distinct from other approaches to the measurement of gerrymandering, and has some clear advantages, above all as a complement to simulation-based approaches. It can also be used prospectively by district-drawers who wish to create maps that reflect voter geography, but according to our analysis, that goal is sometimes in conflict with the goal of partisan fairness.

Relative to its overall statewide support, the Republican Party has been over-represented in Congressional delegations and state legislatures over the last decade in a number of U.S. states. A challenge is to determine the extent to which this can be explained by intentional gerrymandering as opposed to an underlying inefficient distribution of Democrats in cities. We explain the “spatial inefficiency” of support for Democrats, and demonstrate that it varies substantially both across states and also across legislative chambers within states. We introduce a simple method for measuring this inefficiency by assessing the partisanship of the nearest neighbors of each voter in each U.S. state. Our measure of spatial efficiency helps explain cross-state patterns in legislative representation, and allows us to verify that political geography contributes substantially to inequalities in political representation. At the same time, however, we also show that even after controlling for spatial efficiency, partisan control of the redistricting process has had a substantial impact on the parties’ seat shares.

Political Dislocation measures the degree to which the partisanship of a voter’s actual district is aligned with that of their immediate geographic neighbors. As shown in Eubank and Rodden (2019), this measure evaluates whether districts grouping constituents in a manner that reflect voters’ geographic communities appropriately, and also serves to detect district boundary manipulation and gerrymandering for political gain. In this paper, we develop a version of Political Dislocation that uses travel times — rather than geographic distance — to more accurately estimate the characteristics of voters’ local neighborhoods. We show that this measure can not only do a better job of detecting certain types of unnatural districting — such as districts that jump impassable geographic barriers, like large bodies of water — but also leads to different conclusions about the representativeness of districts composed of certain types of voters, such as those in suburbs.

Do local election administrators change precincts and polling place locations to target voters based on their partisanship or race? We systematically evaluate whether decisions consistent with targeting occur using a the universe of eligible voters, polling place locations and precinct boundaries across three presidential elections in the closely contested state of North Carolina. Overall, we find no evidence that local administrators allocate precincts and polling places in a manner consistent with partisan manipulation for electoral gain on average. Some counties initially appear to differentially target opposition party voters with these changes, but closer examination reveals that the county-level variation is likely due to random variation, not deliberate manipulation. There is also little evidence that the removal of minority voter protections in Shelby County v. Holder impacted polling place allocation. Based on the observed behavior, if partisan-motivated decisions occur they are seemingly more idiosyncratic than pervasive.

How do changes in Election Day polling place locations affect voter turnout? We study the behavior of more than 2 million eligible voters across three closely-contested presidential elections (2008-2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting on average statewide. However, this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting, suggesting that voters, on average, respond to a change in their polling place by choosing to vote early. While there is heterogeneity in these effects by the distance of the polling place change and the race of the affected voter, the fully offsetting substitution into early voting still obtains. We theorize this is because voters whose polling places change location receive notification mailers, offsetting search costs and priming them to think about the election before election day, driving early voting.

Theory predicts that social networks can facilitate or frustrate social sanctioning as a solution to the collective action problem, but empirical tests have been limited. We use data from the near-universe of cell-phone subscribers in Venezuela to measure each person’s network exposure, or how quickly others hear about her, which theory pinpoints as a driver of participation. We then find that participants in two collective political activities—a protest, and the signing of a petition—have higher network exposure than non-participants with similar observable characteristics. The magnitude of the difference is politically meaningful: subtle shifts in social networks could change the fortunes of the Venezuelan opposition. Together with qualitative data, we interpret these findings as evidence in favor of the idea that network structure mediates the ability of social sanctioning and social approbation to solve the collective action problem.

Citizens often mirror the behavior of their peers, but our understanding of the dynamics of this influence is limited. For example, in what settings does the choice of one person to vote cascade through a community and lead to high voter turnout? Despite substantial theoretical inroads into this question, direct empirical tests remain scarce. Using data on the social networks of 15 villages in rural Uganda, this paper develops theoretical predictions about expected cross-village variation in turnout based on the network structure of each village, and demonstrates that these predictions are tightly linked with actual turnout in low-salience local elections with limited media attention, though not in high-salience presidential elections. These results provide the first direct empirical validation of “social context” theory, and introduce a finding of importance for future empirical network research: the salience of social networks may be conditional on the information environment.

Ethnic politics scholars are increasingly convinced that (a) the political salience of ethnicity and (b) the correlation between ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) and poor development are driven by the dense social networks shared by co-ethnics. By this argument, social networks allow ethnic parties to leverage inbuilt networks to share information and support collective action, while ethnically fragmented communities struggle to hold politicians accountable. This paper provides the first comprehensive empirical test of the assumption underlying this argument. Using seven months of telecommunications data from 9 million mobile subscribers in Zambia – which includes records of almost 2 billion calls and SMS messages – to measure social networks across an entire country, this paper finds that electoral constituencies with high ELF also have more fragmented social networks, especially in rural areas. It also finds other potential cleavages that have not achieved political salience (namely religious identity and employment sector) are not correlated with network fragmentation, consistent with the idea ethnicity achieves salience because it offers an organizational advantage not offered by other cleavages. Finally, it also finds that both voter knowledge and public goods are negatively correlated with network fragmentation, consistent with the network-proxy hypothesis.

For years, studies of state formation in early and medieval Europe have argued that the modern, representative state emerged as the result of negotiations between autocratic governments in need of tax revenues and citizens who were only willing to consent to taxation in exchange for greater government accountability. This article presents evidence that similar dynamics shaped the formation of Somaliland’s democratic government. In particular, it shows that government dependency on local tax revenues – which resulted from its ineligibility for foreign assistance – provided those outside the government with the leverage needed to force the development of inclusive, representative and accountable political institutions.

The current focus of political science on characterizing equilibria has at times come at the expense of understanding the drivers of political change. But political change is not only relatively frequent, it is also often driven by the capacity of lone individuals to affect deep changes in the central dimensions of political competition. This paper identifies numerous cases of electoral realignments induced by these individual political entrepreneurs in US states over the past 150 years. It does so using a novel empirical strategy with the potential for more general applications. Furthermore, the paper shows that while it may be impossible to fully explain the idiosyncratic timing of the appearance of individual entrepreneurs, as a population, there is evidence that entrepreneurs respond to institutional features that affect the ease of political entry. Using a difference-in-difference empirical strategy that takes advantage of variation in the introduction of primaries at the state level, this paper shows that the introduction of primaries in the United States has lead to an increase in the emergence of political entrepreneurs using both actual and instrumented primary implementation dates.

An affirmative statement about how social scientists should think about programming mistakes, in part as a corrective to my slightly smug tone in the article below.

Empirical review of replication issues found in papers published in Quarterly Journal of Political Science.