Leander Heldring (Northwestern University), "Bureaucracy as a tool for Politicians: Evidence from Germany" (link to PDF)
Abstract
This paper studies the impact of a well-functioning bureaucracy on the effectiveness of repression, in the context of Germany’s Nazi regime. I compare former Prussian to non-Prussian municipalities within unified Germany in a regression discontinuity framework. When the Nazis persecuted the German Jews, Prussian areas implemented deportations of Jews more efficiently. During the Weimar republic, when Jews were legally protected, violence against Jews is lower in former Prussian areas. In both periods, Prussian local governments had greater ‘capacity’: They were more effective at raising taxes and collecting trash. Capacity derived from greater specialization and better information processing rather than from effort. Specialization may have created the moral wiggle room to implement repugnant directives.... Read more about Leander Heldring (Alesina Seminar)
Ross Mattheis (Department of Economics), "Spurious Mobility in Imperfectly Linked Data Trials" (joint with Jiafeng Chen)
Abstract
Estimating intergenerational mobility often requires linking data across multiple sources. However, mistakes in record linkage can introduce biases in subsequent estimates. This paper re-examines the history of intergenerational mobility in the United States with emphasis on bias from imperfectly linked data... Read more about Ross Mattheis (Workshop in Applied Statistics)
Tyler Simko: brainstorming session on local meeting videos
Abstract
I've been collecting videos of local government meetings with Soubhik Barari for several years. We identify meetings on YouTube for as many governments as possible, then process them to get the video, audio, and transcript data. We now have two datasets: (1) the original project called LocalView, with ~150k meeting videos from local legislatures (primarily city councils), and (2) a newly scraped second dataset of ~150k school board meeting videos. We're now planning...
Stephanie Zonszein (UC Berkeley), "Turn On, Tune In, Turn Out: Ethnic Radio and Immigrants’ Political Engagement"
Abstract
Does the ethnic media promote the political engagement of minority ethnic immigrants? This is a salient question in Western democracies, where the political incorporation of immigrants is a continuous challenge. Prevailing accounts place the media as a primary cause of growing public disengagement. In contrast, this article argues that the entry of informative-based ethnic media can increase immigrants’ political engagement by changing their informational environment and their representation in media and state institutions. In 2004 the UK Parliament enacted the Community Radio Order to allow the licensing of community radio stations. Leveraging the introduction of this law and geographical variation in the distribution of licenses with a difference-in-differences approach, this article shows that the exposure of minority ethnic immigrants to radio programming targeted at their community substantively increases their turnout in local elections. The results suggest that immigrants’ participation in politics is stimulated by accommodating diversity within common institutions.
CGIS Knafel, room K262 (Bowie-Vernon room) or Virtual via Zoom
Speaker
Daniel Krol, Sandstorm Community Project
Abstract
In the modern era of data collection by governments and corporations, concerns have grown over user privacy and autonomy in personal and cloud computing. One outgrowth of this concern is the "self-hosting" movement which promotes open source web applications that are made for users to install and manage themselves, ideally on their own hardware. Self-hosting is an alternative to using... Read more about Desert Atlas: Building A Self-Hosted, Collaborative, Online Map that is Easy and Private (GIS Colloquium)
Teppei Yamamoto (MIT), "Using Covariates to Improve Inference in the Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment (PICA) Design for Randomized Controlled Trials" (joint with Adam Kaplan)
Abstract
A key challenge in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is to ensure external validity so that findings from a study can inform real-world policy decisions, where individual decision-makers may self-select into different treatments based on their own preferences about the treatment options. If the effects of treatments depend on...
Jack Deschler presents his project on judicial appointments.
Abstract
The Blue Slip privilege, when active, allows home-state senators a de facto veto over the appointment of judges to the Federal Courts of Appeals and District Courts. Previous research has focused on the impact that coparty senators can have on the ideology of judicial appointments, but largely ignored the effect of opposition Senators. Using data from the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME), I demonstrate that Presidents are constrained in their...
