Working Papers
Issues, Partisanship, and Valence in Elections
Voters in the United States cast ballots for individual candidates, not bundles of policies or political parties. It is therefore important to understand how Americans consider candidates' personal traits, relative to their issue positions and partisanship, when voting. Using a conjoint survey experiment, I study the relationship between issue proximity and valence in voting. I find evidence that voters weigh personal traits less heavily the larger the issue advantage one candidate holds over the other, and that this finding extends to tradeoffs between partisanship and personal quality. These findings have implications for our understanding of the role of personal traits in elections and how we should consider them when evaluating candidate performance in an observational context. These findings also reinforce concerns regarding the effects of polarization on good governance.
Partisan Double Standards in Elections
Recent work has investigated the existence of double standards in partisans' evaluations of candidates, but it is unclear how far these double standards extend. I evaluate partisan double standards in the reward of prior political experience and the punishment of wrongdoing. I find mixed evidence regarding the generalizability of double standards. While partisan voters may reward copartisans for political experience more than they do outpartisans, they reward it for candidates of both parties, indicating that voters value political experience even when held by outpartisans. For candidate wrongdoing, I find evidence of an effect opposite that seen in recent literature, with partisan voters penalizing copartisans for wrongdoing even more than they do outpartisans at both the candidate and single-party-election levels, implying that partisan voters are still able to serve as effective political gatekeepers against normatively-undesirable candidates.
Constituent Contact and Legislator Behavior
Legislators at all levels of government are tasked with representing their constituents and face regular elections where those constituents can remove them for poor performance. Yet legislators hear from only a small percentage of their constituents in a year, let alone on a single piece of legislation. Recent experiments have sought to examine the effect of constituent-level appeals on legislator behavior, but we still know little about how legislators use a small number of signals to understand the preferences of their districts more broadly. I present a formal model of constituent-level messaging and legislator responsiveness where a subset of a legislator's constituency messages her on a bill, and, using those contacts, the legislator determines the preferred policy of her constituency. When a legislator correctly identifies the costs her constituents face in contacting her on a bill, she is able to correctly interpret the preferences of her constituents. If a legislator has uncertainty regarding these contact costs, however, she can misperceive the salience of a bill and even her constituents' preferences on it, leading to inefficiencies in representation. These inefficiencies are worsened by heightened legislator polarization.
Measuring Partisan Competitiveness in State Legislatures: A Simulation Approach (with June Hwang and Michael R. Kistner)
Despite over half a century of research on the effects of inter-party competition in state legislative politics, scholars continue to use measures of competition that serve only as rough proxies of the core theoretical concept, the probability of a shift in majority status. Existing measures focused on relative seat share do not take into account the security of individual seats, which can greatly impact competition at the chamber level. To address this issue, we introduce an alternative approach to measuring inter-party competition that explicitly estimates the probability of change in the majority party using a two-step Monte Carlo simulation technique. We demonstrate our measure's improvement over a seat share-based measure in predicting actual majority changes and compare our estimated probabilities of possible seat shares to observed results. Ultimately, we produce competition scores in 47 states over the past twenty years.
Re-Evaluating “Re-Election Seeking” (with Sebastian M. Saling)
David Mayhew's conceptualization of re-election-seeking politicians helped revolutionize formal theoretical and empirical work on elections, positioning the pursuit, and retention, of office as the primary motivation for individual politicians. Recent pieces by authors such as Frances Lee, however, indicate that politicians highly value majority-party status, even conditional on membership in a chamber. If the rewards, both extrinsic and intrinsic, politicians receive from holding office indeed vary with control of a legislative chamber, we should similarly expect politicians to vary in their willingness to abandon political office for outside opportunities. To that end, we examine how the rate of incumbents running for re-election varies based on majority-party status in a chamber. We hypothesize that minority party members have lower office-holding incentives and therefore run for re-election at lower rates than incumbents in the majority party. Using the data from this project, we also evaluate whether members of the two major political parties approach running for re-election in fundamentally different ways, hypothesizing that Republicans will run for re-election at lower rates than Democrats.