Peer-Reviewed Publications
(with Justin H. Phillips) Political Behavior. Forthcoming.
Publisher's Version Preprint Replication Data
Abstract
Research consistently demonstrates that differences between the policy preferences of high- and low-income individuals are surprisingly small, at least at the aggregate level. We depart from this work by considering the size of income-based differences in opinion within political parties. To do so, we use responses to 144 policy-specific questions in the 2010-2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Our effort demonstrates that differences in opinion among the rich and poor tend to be larger within the parties than in the overall population. Interestingly, these gaps are largest among Democrats. We find that these larger gaps persist even after accounting for the party’s racial and ethnic diversity. Furthermore, among Democrats, classbased gaps in opinion are larger than the gaps we observe among other potential intraparty cleavages, such as age, gender, and religiosity. Our results suggest important implications for the growing literature on representational inequality.
Working Papers
(with Gerald Gamm, Justin H. Phillips, and Matthew Carr) Conditionally accepted at Studies in American Political Development.
Draft
Abstract
Partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of contemporary American politics. This was not always the case; for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, social issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights played no role in politics. Where and when did the partisan divide begin? Did the initiative come from state or national parties? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? We have constructed an original database of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1960 to 2018. These platforms allow us to trace position-taking on these issues and generate estimates of platform ideology. By the time national parties took positions, we show, they lagged state-level position-taking. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we show that state party system polarization did not occur around any critical moment but rather was incremental.
Conditionally accepted at State Politics and Policy Quarterly.
Draft Appendix
Abstract
The development of Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) has allowed scholars to more accurately estimate subnational public opinion using national polls. However, MRP generally fails to recover reliable estimates from polls whose respondents are selected using cluster sampling—also called area-probability sampling. This is in part because cluster-sampled polls rely on a complex form of random sampling focused on national representativeness that may result in small or unrepresentative subsamples in subnational geographies. This has limited MRP's usefulness in subnational opinion estimation in several contexts, including historical polls in the United States, where cluster-sampling was common into the 1980s, and large academic studies in many countries today. In this paper, I test two approaches to improve estimation from MRP with cluster-sampled polls. The first is pooling data from multiple surveys to produce a larger sample of clusters. The second is Clustered MRP (CMRP), which extends MRP by modeling opinion using the geographic information included in a survey's cluster-sampling procedure. Using simulations, I show that both methods improve upon traditional MRP, and I validate them using historical polls in the United States.
Draft Appendix
Abstract
Electoral accountability is central to theories of representation in democracies, and it is widely believed that the news media play a critical role. This paper examines whether and how the media contribute to accountability. Drawing on an extensive archive of local newspaper transcripts, media market and circulation data, state legislative roll-call votes, and measures of district-level public opinion on five policy areas, I find that media coverage is associated with greater policy responsiveness in state legislatures. Defying the seminal theories of electoral accountability, however, I find no evidence that the media affects what the public knows about state politics or how they behave in state legislative elections. Rather, I conjecture that local news affects representation via a more direct, elite-focused “watchdog” mechanism—by informing legislators about public opinion or increasing the perceived costs that politicians face when deciding to cast an unpopular vote.
Draft Appendix
Abstract
Dramatic, decades-long declines in local news has raised alarm bells about democratic accountability in cities and towns where legacy local news outlets are often the only sources of information for the public. But even in its heyday, local news almost never covered most municipal governments. Using text analysis on a large archive of stories published in U.S. newspapers, I identify the cities and towns where local politics is most frequently covered by the press. I show that although decisions about where to prioritize coverage of local politics is broadly consistent with news organizations’ profit incentives, there are striking disparities in access to information about municipal governments. The local press is much more likely to cover politics in larger cities and those with more white and wealthy residents. In cities and towns that the press covers more frequently, local governments also spend more on popular and visible public goods, such as policing, parks, housing, and public transportation. This suggests that increasing financial pressures on news outlets will have negative implications for local public goods provision that may exacerbate existing inequalities in American democracy.
Newspapers, News Deserts and Political Behavior in Local Elections
(with Shigeo Hirano and James M. Snyder, Jr.)
Multivariate MRP
(with Max Goplerud)