Cat O’Donnell, "Trump Movement Dynamics in Local Republican Party Organizations"
Abstract
Hundreds of local GOP committees around the country have been “captured” by Trump activists over the last several years, providing an organizational basis for Trump’s re-election effort. How do MAGA activists take over local party organizations? What makes organizations vulnerable or resistant to cooptation by the Trump movement? I am putting together a nationwide audit study of local GOP committees and conducting qualitative fieldwork of the grassroots...
Amy Pond (Washington University in St. Louis), "The Electoral Costs of Reforming Political Institutions"
Abstract
Biased political institutions can privilege one party over others, helping to assure that party’s future electoral success. Yet, despite controlling enough votes to make reforms, parties fre quently abstain from reforming institutions. What explains their forbearance? We elaborate a formal model in which citizens punish parties for any sort of reform, as they believe that parties could benefit themselves with biased reforms. Even if citizens are not informed about the content of the reform, they anticipate that biased parties are likely to implement biased reforms and they punish parties for any reform at all. Drawing on a survey experiment, we then evaluate the model using real proposals for electoral reforms in Germany. In line with the model, citizens become less supportive of the opposition and the opposition’s proposed electoral reform, when they are informed that the opposition is associated with the reform. By contrast, the coalition government’s proposal is perceived as less biased, arguably because it is already a compromise of three parties. The model thus helps explain the endurance of inefficient electoral institutions: if any reform is punished, even unbiased reforms are untenable.... Read more about Amy Pond (Alesina Seminar)
The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.
Uma Ilavarasan, "Policy by Contract: How the State’s Market Power Governs Regulatory Processes"
Abstract
While existing accounts of the state emphasize its monopolies and its revenue-raising capacity, states spend considerable sums: significant shares of raised revenues are converted through contracts with ostensibly private entities into the technologies and human capital that make up the state’s machinery. Thus... Read more about Uma Ilavarasan (APRW)
Charles Angelucci (MIT), "Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election" (w/Michel Gutmann and Andrea Prat)
Abstract
We use a large-scale news knowledge survey conducted just before the 2020 US presidential election, alongside monthly survey data, to explore how partisan differences in political news beliefs evolve. We exploit questions repeated in multiple surveys to identify changes in beliefs about the same news stories as the election approaches. Our findings indicate that partisan bias intensifies two to threefold during election periods. Within a framework of motivated beliefs, this change in partisan bias is predominantly driven by an amplification of the partisan identity effect, rather than differences in partisan recall. We also present findings from a counterfactual analysis that assesses the impact of a hypothetical targeted misinformation campaign during and outside of elections. ... Read more about Charles Angelucci (Alesina Seminar)
Anton Strezhnev (UChicago), "A Guide to Dynamic Difference-in-Differences Regressions for Political Scientists"
Abstract
Difference-in-differences (DiD) designs for estimating causal effects have grown in popularity throughout political science. Many DiD papers present their central results through an "event study" plot - a visualization that combines estimated dynamic average treatment effects for multiple post-treatment time periods alongside placebo tests of the main identifying assumption: parallel trends. Despite their...
Andrew O’Donohue, "The Court of Public Opinion: How Competing Rhetoric about Trump's Prosecution Affects Political Attitudes"
Abstract
Prosecutions of political leaders may have double-edged effects on public opinion. While legal interventions may turn public opinion against law-breaking politicians, prosecutions may also increase support for the accused leader and encourage his supporters to seek retaliation. Crucially, political elites seek to persuade citizens with competing framings of political prosecutions. Whereas legal officials...
