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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (37 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)
Communications from constituents strongly shape the representation politicians provide. However, if politicians hear less from some constituents than others, this unequal communication may lead to unequal representation. In this article, I present a field experiment demonstrating that constituents are less likely to communicate to representatives not of their race. The experiment exploited electoral rules in Maryland, where several multimember districts have both black and white representatives. I provided 8,829 residents of such districts an opportunity to communicate to one of their actual representatives, whose race I randomized. Both blacks and whites were markedly less likely to communicate to their representatives not of their race. These results imply that politicians receive racially distorted communication, hearing disproportionately infrequently from constituents unlike them. The fact that most racial minorities have white representatives may thus help explain both minorities' less frequent communication to their representatives and the diminished substantive representation minorities typically receive. © 2013, Midwest Political Science Association.
  • 1 supplemental PDF
Cover page: Distorted Communication, Unequal Representation: Constituents Communicate Less to Representatives Not of Their Race
  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)
Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data have documented what donors actually want from government, and existing research has devoted less attention to donors' views on individual issues. Findings from an original survey of US donors, including an oversample of the largest donors, and a concurrently fielded mass survey document significant heterogeneity by party and policy domain in how donors' and citizens' views diverge. We find that Republican donors are much more conservative than Republican citizens on economic issues, whereas their views are similar on social issues. By contrast, Democratic donors are much more liberal than Democratic citizens on social issues, whereas their views are more similar on economic issues. Both parties' donors, but especially Democratic donors, are more pro-globalism than their citizen counterparts. We replicate these patterns in an independent dataset. Our findings have important implications for the study of American politics.
    Cover page: What Do Partisan Donors Want?
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2013)
    Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators' political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities' political interests. ©2013, Midwest Political Science Association.
    • 1 supplemental PDF
    Cover page: Black Politicians Are More Intrinsically Motivated to Advance Blacks’ Interests: A Field Experiment Manipulating Political Incentives
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)
    Persistent gender gaps in political officeholding and mass political participation jeopardize women's equal representation in government. This paper brings new evidence to the longstanding hypotheses that the presence of additional female candidates and officeholders helps address these gaps by empowering other women to vote or run for office themselves. With a regression discontinuity approach and data on 3813 US state legislative elections where a woman opposed a man, I find that the election of additional women in competitive US state legislative elections has no discernible causal effects on other women's political participation at the mass or elite levels. These estimates are precise enough to rule out even substantively small effects. These results stand in stark contrast to a number of findings from India, suggesting that although electing the first women in a society can have these empowering effects, remaining barriers to women's inclusion in American democracy go beyond what further increases in female officeholding can themselves erode. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
      Cover page: Do female politicians empower women to vote or run for office? A regression discontinuity approach
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2012)
      Few political observers would readily assume that a present-day politician's or interest group's claims about their preferences accurately reflect their genuine views. However, scholars often unwittingly make this very assumption when inferring the preferences of historical political actors. In this article I explore the influence of business groups on Medicare's passage to illustrate how inattention to political actors' strategic misrepresentations can bias qualitative and quantitative research. An ongoing debate wrestles with the pattern that businesses often grant support to welfare-state expansions just before they occur, a regularity some take as evidence that business interests dictate these expansions. I use Medicare as a case study and document that key business groups and their allies did not truly favor the program. However, I also show that these actors strategically misrepresented their preferences as Medicare's passage became likely in order to advance more limited alternatives. The strategic nature of this position is exceptionally easy to miss; yet inattention to it produces the opposite, erroneous conclusion about these actors' historical role. Medicare's legislative history thus illustrates the methodological necessity of documenting whether political actors are misrepresenting their preferences. I discuss how scholars can do so by tracing actors' stated preferences across strategic circumstances, including audiences and time. © Cambridge University Press 2012.
        Cover page: The “Problem of Preferences”: Medicare and Business Support for the Welfare State*
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2009)
        Although the presidential coattail effect has been an object of frequent study, the question of whether popular congressional candidates boost vote shares in return for their parties' presidential candidates remains unexplored. This article investigates whether so-called "reverse coattails" exist using a regression discontinuity design with congressional district-level data from presidential elections between 1952 and 2004. Taking incumbency to be near-randomly distributed in cases where congressional candidates have just won or lost their previous elections, I find that the numerous substantial advantages of congressional incumbency have no effect on presidential returns for these incumbents' parties. This null finding underscores my claim that the existing coattail literature deserves greater scrutiny. My results also prompt a rethinking of the nature of the advantages that incumbents bring to their campaigns and may help deepen our understanding of partisanship in the United States. © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology. All rights reserved.
          Cover page: Do Congressional Candidates Have Reverse Coattails? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)
          Existing research depicts intergroup prejudices as deeply ingrained, requiring intense intervention to lastingly reduce. Here, we show that a single approximately 10-minute conversation encouraging actively taking the perspective of others can markedly reduce prejudice for at least 3 months. We illustrate this potential with a door-to-door canvassing intervention in South Florida targeting antitransgender prejudice. Despite declines in homophobia, transphobia remains pervasive. For the intervention, 56 canvassers went door to door encouraging active perspective-taking with 501 voters at voters' doorsteps. A randomized trial found that these conversations substantially reduced transphobia, with decreases greater than Americans' average decrease in homophobia from 1998 to 2012. These effects persisted for 3 months, and both transgender and nontransgender canvassers were effective. The intervention also increased support for a nondiscrimination law, even after exposing voters to counterarguments.
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2019)
            Medicare is one of the largest social programs in the world. Did organized industry favor Medicare's passage in 1965? If it did, this would represent powerful evidence in favor of the theory that social programs typically require cross-class alliances to pass, such as alliances between business and labor. However, in a previous article in this journal, I argued that answering questions about political actors’ preferences—such as whether organized industry favored Medicare's passage—can be surprisingly difficult due to the “problem of preferences”; that is, political actors might misrepresent their true policy preferences for many reasons. For example, when their ideal proposals are not politically feasible, political actors may wish to bolster support for a more politically viable alternative to a disliked proposal—even if they do not truly support this alternative to the status quo. To better understand political actors’ true policy preferences, I argued, scholars should trace how those actors’ expressed preferences change as a function of their strategic context—just as scholars seeking to understand the impact of any other variable trace the effects of changes in it.
              Cover page: Ascertaining Business's Interests and Political Preferences
              • Thesis
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2024)

              This dissertation focuses on three questions within non-market strategy---that is to say, at the intersection of business and politics.

              Recently, companies have increasingly taken public stances on controversial political and social issues. While business has long sought to influence political policies in its own self-interest, this typically focused on economic issues with a direct connection to the financial bottom line---e.g., taxes, trade, and regulation---rather than contentious, morally-infused issues such as abortion, gun violence, LGBTQ rights, and racial (in)equality. In thinking about when and why companies may engage in this activism, I consider how stakeholders' influence may influence and constrain corporate decisions to engage on these issues. In this dissertation, the first two chapters focus consider employees, while the third focuses on customers.

              The first chapter of this dissertation, "Office Parties: Partisan Sorting in the United States Labor Market'' (co-authored with Justin Frake and Reuben Hurst) I thank both Justin Frake and Reuben Hurst for their permission in allowing me to adapt this co-authored work for the purposes of this dissertation.} explores the extent of partisan sorting among employees in the United States. We create an original longitudinal dataset by merging voter registration data with with 17 million online employee profiles covering 14.5 million unique workers from 2012–2022. This represents the largest-ever dataset of this kind, with significantly larger (and less socioeconomically biased) coverage than other measures of employees' partisanship. Using these original data, we present four main findings. First, we find significant evidence that individuals are politically sorted across workplaces. Whereas prior work in political science has held up the workplace as an ideal locus of cross-partisan context, we find that the average Democratic worker's co-workers are about 15 percentage points more Democratic than the average Republicans co-workers, and vice versa. The extent of observed sorting is largely---but not entirely---associated with partisan sorting among metropolitan areas, industries, and occupations. Accounting for factors correlated with partisanship—geography, occupation, and industry—reduces this estimate to about 2 percentage points, which is similar in magnitude to our estimates of workplace sorting by gender and race. Second, we find that sorting appears more pronounced among workers who may have more labor market power (e.g., white workers, more senior workers, and workers in jobs which require more training) as well as workers who appear more politically engaged. Third, political sorting has increased among new joiners to firms since 2017. Fourth, because Democrats comprise a greater share of the workforce, sorting means that Republicans experience a significantly larger share of out-partisan co-workers.

              The second chapter of this dissertation, "Do Conservative Social Policies Harm Access to Employee Talent? Evidence from the North Carolina Bathroom Bill, takes up a common rhetorical claim companies make to explain their decision to speak out on contentious socially issue. One common explanation for ``corporate sociopolitical activism" is that government policies can make it harder to attract talented employees, and so companies expose these policies which have the potential to harm their businesses. While these employee-centric justifications for CSA are widespread, there is limited evidence measuring whether these types of policies actually do have a negative impact on firms' ability to attract employees. This paper tests whether government policies do harm businesses by reducing their access to employee talent. I look at employee responses to North Carolina's 2016 HB2 law (the ``bathroom bill"), which prompted national attention and over 100 CEOs to argue that it would harm North Carolina's ability to attract workers. Using administrative data which cover 95% of U.S. employees, and the recently-developed Generalized Synthetic Control (GSC) technique (Xu 2017), I find no evidence that HB2 resulted in a decline in workers' in-migration to North Carolina or an increase in workers' out-migration from the state, meaning that the bill did not appear to reduce North Carolina employers' access to talent. This null finding is precisely estimated and holds both for overall in-migration and out-migration and there is no evidence of heterogeneity among young workers, college-educated workers, or workers in specific industries. I also rule out that this null result was driven by a compensating differential in wages for workers relocating to or from North Carolina or that it was the result of offsetting partisan shifts in migration patterns.

              Finally, the third chapter, "This Bud's For You? The Effect of Partisan Political Cues on Politically Polarized Brands,'' investigates whether partisan cues can potentially unwind or attenuate already-polarized customer preferences. Real-world events and political cues can induce political polarization in consumption patterns. When politically-motivated customers find out that seemingly neutral or apolitical brands support a political party or take a political stance, they may respond by boycotting or “buycotting” the brand in question. To date, no research has explored what happens when customers receive a political cue about a brand that is not viewed as neutral or apolitical, but one which already has a polarized reputation. This survey experiment takes advantage of the recent conservative boycott of Bud Light following the brand’s partnership with a transgender social media influencer. Using the context of this (mostly) Republican boycott of Bud Light after the brand partnered with a transgender influencer, I find that partisan political cues likely constitute a one-way ratchet on polarized brand reputations. Republicans remain negatively disposed towards the brand even when told that Republican leaders (including President Trump) support the brand. I do that partisan cues can erode support for brands: When Democrats were told that fellow Democrats were boycotting Bud Light, they become less likely to select the brand in a choice-based conjoint task, and far more likely to report boycotting the brand. I also find that this polarization in expressed attitudes may not always be backed up with actual changes in economic behavior, as a significant portion of respondents who claim to be boycotting the brand give inconsistent survey responses which suggest they may not actually be boycotting.

                Cover page: Walking the Tightrope: Understanding Stakeholder Political Preferences and Their Influence on Corporate Sociopolitical Activism
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2014)
                Politicians' personal beliefs and backgrounds strongly influence politics and policy. But why do individuals with particular beliefs and backgrounds tend to run for office and become politicians? This paper argues that parties and interest groups strategically shape the candidate pool from which voters choose by mobilizing certain individuals to run for office, much like they strategically shape the electorate by mobilizing like-minded individuals to vote. Supporting this view, I first unearth decades of previously disparate evidence suggesting that candidate mobilization efforts are widespread. I then present results from an experiment embedded in an actual candidate mobilization effort that finds encouragement to run for office can meaningfully increase interest in candidacy. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed.
                  Cover page: Mobilizing Candidates: Political Actors Strategically Shape the Candidate Pool with Personal Appeals
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