When do public policies influence citizens’ political attitudes and behavior, and among whom? We study this question using one of the largest social provision programs in the United States: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). We exploit the staggered roll-out of state-level EITC programs to estimate the causal effect of the program on elections, voter behavior, and attitudes about the government. Contrary to predictions from the policy feedback literature, we show that the credit leads to higher vote shares and approval ratings for the implementing governor. These effects are temporally limited to the first years of the credit’s availability, and dissipate over time. Taken together, our results offer new insights about the conditions under which particularistic economic policies affect political outcomes.

Link · Supporting Information · Replication
Contemporary and historical political debates often revolve around principles of federalism, in which governing authority is divided across levels of government. Despite the prominence of these debates, existing scholarship provides relatively limited evidence about the nature and structure of Americans’ preferences for decentralization. We develop a new survey-based measure to characterize attitudes toward subnational power and evaluate it with a national sample of more than 2000 American adults. We find that preferences for devolution vary considerably both across and within states, and reflect individuals’ ideological orientations and evaluations of government performance. Overall, our battery produces a reliable survey instrument for evaluating preferences for federalism and provides new evidence that attitudes toward institutional arrangements are structured less by short-term political interests than by core preferences for the distribution of state authority.

Link · Supporting Information
We study the political economy of redistribution over a broad class of decision rules. We suggest a simple and elegant procedure to select a robust equilibrium from the multiplicity in the core. Equilibrium policy depends on the full income profile, and, importantly, the preferences of two decisive voters. We show that the effect of increasing inequality depends on the decision rule and the shape of the income distribution; redistribution will increase if both decisive voters are “relatively poor,” and decrease if at least one is sufficiently “rich.” Additionally, redistribution decreases as the polity adopts increasingly stringent super-majority rules.

Far from the purely constituent-oriented or purely party-oriented member of Congress (MC) that existingwork posits, this paper argues that MCs’ social groups and the norms of behavior that define them canpowerfully constrain legislators’ behaviors. Guided by insights from scholarship on legislative organizations and identity politics, I test my argument using the case of Black MCs and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). My main empirical strategy uses an original data set of committee hearing transcriptsfrom 2007 to 2019 and a design that exploits members’ exposure to fellow Black MCs on their variouscommittee assignments to uncover the impact of group pressures on CBC members. I show that the effect of serving on a committee with more co-ethnic legislators varies by a given MC’s type: Members that are more aligned with the interests of the CBC — those that are left-leaning and represent more-Black Congressional districts — participate more in committee hearings, and members that are less aligned participate less. I then show using a series of empirical tests and qualitative evidence drawing on eliteinterviews that this pattern of results is driven by in-group sanctions for behavior that is inconsistentwith caucus wishes. Together, the theory and findings shed light on the role of groups and their norms in shaping elite behavior and provide evidence for the contextual nature of legislative Black political behavior

Working Paper

When does descriptive representation translate into substantive benefits for marginalized groups? While greater representation is often assumed to improve outcomes for racial, ethnic, and gender minorities, this paper argues that effectiveness depends on the ability of minority legislators to coordinate, which is shaped by group size, member similarity, and political power. Using data on American state legislators from 1996 to 2020, I find that higher cohesion within Black, Hispanic, and White female Democratic legislative groups is associated with smaller group size, greater biographical similarity among members, and Democratic control of the chamber. More cohesive groups are also more productive, sponsoring and passing more legislation benefiting their identity group. Two natural experiments highlight the drivers of cohesion. First, term limits increase cohesion by replacing senior members with a more homogeneous membership and by creating political precarity. Second, redistricting reduces cohesion when legislators lose co-racial constituents, reflecting the role of aligned interests in fostering unity. Using an instrumental variables framework, I further show that these localized shocks to group unity are positively associated with legislative productivity. These findings reveal that cohesion is critical for transforming representation into meaningful outcomes. Moreover, while representation matters, the alignment of interests within groups and the broader political context play pivotal roles in determining the effectiveness of minority legislators.

Draft available upon request

When democratic institutions are threatened, how do bureaucrats respond? On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was breached by approximately 2,000 protestors during the certification of electoral votes, prompting the evacuation of Congress members and their staff. We examine how the event reshaped congressional human capital by forcing staffers to choose between remaining with their congressional employers or exiting. Unlike routine political conflicts, January 6 struck at the symbolic foundations of government service, creating a natural experiment in how institutional crises affect professional commitment. Using comprehensive data on congressional offices and staff careers from 2007 to the present, we employ event study and difference-in-differences designs, leveraging partisan variation in institutional attachment. We find sharp divergence: Democratic staffers—especially senior aides and those with advanced degrees—exited at significantly higher rates. Career trajectory evidence from social media shows that these high-human-capital staff disproportionately moved to less politicized government roles, while post-January 6 hires were younger, less credentialed, and more likely to remain in partisan positions after their time on Capitol Hill. Taken together, these findings show that institutional shocks not only trigger turnover but also reconfigure the composition of government workforces, draining precisely the kinds of expertise and experience on which institutional capacity depends.

New version soon - Draft available upon request

How do political conflicts at the highest levels of government filter into the everyday practices of universities and their staff? The 2023 Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action redefined the legal landscape of college admissions, exposing day-to-day admissions work to political and legal pressures. We examine this case through two preregistered nationwide audit experiments involving over 3,000 U.S. admissions offices. Study 1 recontacted institutions from a 2018 audit of responses to Black and White applicants, enabling a unique pre–post comparison around the Court’s ruling. Study 2 experimentally varied applicant race (Asian, Black, White) and references to the Court's decision. Across both studies, we find that admissions officers respond to applicants of different races with similar average response rates. However, referencing the decision reduced replies to Black applicants but conferred no advantage on Asian or White applicants. Consistent with past work on bureaucratic resilience, we find that admissions staff largely maintained their practices despite a major political and legal shock. Still, the penalty for Black applicants who reference the Supreme Court decision suggests that political pressures may register selectively in everyday interactions.

Under review - Working paper

How is race constructed in American society? Using a conjoint approach, we demonstrate how various sociopolitical markers cue the category “Black,” a label historically constructed as immutable and absolute in the U.S. In doing so, we broaden scholarship on the politics of racial categorization in several ways. We examine how political identity influences racial perceptions, expand beyond an exclusively White sample to assess how minoritized groups weigh racialized cues, and operationalize race via multiple outcomes. We find that contemporary classification as Black is endogenous to politics: individuals are racially categorized in a manner that brings their race into alignment with their partisanship. While parentage and skin tone structure racial classification, acquired traits including spouse’s race and neighborhood racial composition also cue blackness. Moreover, compared to White and mixed-race classifiers, Black classifiers place greater value on Democratic identification and view skin tone as less relevant. Finally, we demonstrate significant variation within the category “Black”: some Black people are seen as “Blacker” than others. All told, our findings provide deeper empirical clarity to a premise at the heart of social science research: race is constructed, and its construction implicates questions of authenticity, prototypicality, and belonging.

Revise & Resubmit, Perspectives on Politics - Draft available upon request