Essays on elections and voting in the United States

My dissertation work studies how and when individuals choose to participate in politics, and how these factors contribute to inequality in political participation and representation. I focus on three inter-related tracks: 1) understanding wealth inequality in political representation, 2) linking voters' economic incentives to their political participation, and 3) estimating the effects of election administration changes on elections and turnout. To do so, I link large administrative datasets on personal economics, voting, government policies, and election outcomes. I then use modern causal inference techniques to study how and when these factors produce inequalities in political participation and representation. The first part of my dissertation examines wealth inequality in who holds elected office in the US, along with the electoral mechanisms that sustain such disparities. In my first paper, ``How Wealthy Are Local Elected Officials? Evidence from Candidates' Housing Wealth, '' I create a new dataset on candidate wealth by linking candidates for state and local offices in California from 2007-2018 to their publicly available housing records. I find that candidates for nearly all local offices live in homes with higher values than the average home in their constituency. While most previous work on candidate wealth focuses on the U.S. Congress, here I show that because wealth disparities appear even at the earliest stages of the candidate pipeline to higher office, policies designed to increase economic representativeness should start at the local level. Next, I show that this wealth gap cannot be entirely explained by constraints on the supply of potentially qualified, lower-wealth candidates: the wealth gap remains large even when comparing candidates to non-candidates with similar backgrounds, like candidates for judicial positions to similarly aged lawyers who attended the same law school, for example. Linking both winning and losing candidates to their housing wealth, I also show that the wealthy are over-represented in local offices in part because elections favor them over lower-wealth candidates. I show how local-level reforms to campaign finance and to at-large election systems, which seem to especially favor wealthy candidates, may increase economic representativeness across many levels of government. Taken together, the results suggest that the entry of high-wealth candidates in local politics, along with electoral advantages accruing to them, both help to explain the economic unrepresentativeness of elected officials across many levels of government. In my second paper, ``Does Property Ownership Lead to Participation in Local Politics? Evidence from Property Records and Meeting Minutes, '' (published at the American Political Science Review), I show that the economic incentives that accompany becoming a property owner are an important driver of participatory inequalities between homeowners and renters in the United States. I combine deed-level property records in California and Texas with an original dataset on individual comments in local city council meetings to study the role of property ownership in shaping costly forms of political behavior. I first document large inequalities in who participates at city council meetings, with homeowners, older residents, men, and regular voters being over-represented. Next, I combine individual-level administrative data on property records, voting, political contributions, and the original dataset on public statements made by individuals at local city council meetings. The analyses span from 2000 at the earliest to 2018 at the latest and include over 3.5 million unique individuals from California and Texas, which offers enormous variation across place and time. By observing the same individual's political behavior both before and after they become a homeowner, I can control for fixed, unobservable characteristics of an individual that affect their likelihood of political participation. Using a series of difference-in-differences designs, I find that becoming a property owner increases many forms of political activity: individuals become more likely to participate in local city council meetings, vote in local elections, and donate to candidates in state and federal elections. Lastly, by collecting original data on individual comments in local political meetings, I show that homeowners and renters seem to care about and prioritize different topics, even within the same meeting where the agenda of topics is held fixed. Homeowners are more likely to raise topics related to housing, traffic, and development, consistent with the ``homevoter'' hypothesis, where homeowners become motivated to participate in local politics in order to protect their property value. Renters, meanwhile, prioritize issues around policing. Overall, these findings illustrate an important trade-off, normatively. On one hand, it might be desirable that the structure of local politics in the US encourages homeowners -- who have an important share of their wealth concentrated in an immobile asset, and therefore have a large financial stake in the local community -- to participate. On the other hand, given the baseline level of wealth necessary to become a property owner, the increase in participation among those who become property owners seems to come at the cost of an electorate that is representative of the broader population, and that property ownership, at least in part, is an important contributor to participatory inequalities in local politics. In my third paper, ``How Polling Place Changes Reduce Turnout: Evidence from Administrative Data in North Carolina, '' I estimate the causal effect of Election Day polling place changes on voter participation using detailed voter file information on nearly 4 million individual voters linked with a panel of polling place locations. Implementing a series of difference-in-differences designs, I find that changing a voter's polling place location causes a 1 to 2 percentage point decline in general election turnout likelihood. The majority of the turnout decline can be attributed to the search costs associated with finding one's new polling place location rather than the distance costs of traveling to the polling place on Election Day. This, along with a series of mechanism tests in the paper, suggests that providing information to voters is important to help mitigate the voting costs associated with election changes. Put together, these projects combine original data collection with modern techniques for causal inference to understand key drivers of inequality in American politics, both for who participates and who holds elected office

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Hall Andrew B.
Grimmer Justin
Martin Gregory (Gregory J.)