Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

Despite a large comparative literature on party machines in distributive politics, few studies have systematically examined how party leaders select local brokers to staff their party organizations. We provide a theoretical framework for studying these selection decisions. We argue that patrons must balance two key concerns: a broker’s efficacy among clients and their loyalty to party and patron. We test the relative importance of these concerns through a conjoint experiment conducted with 343 local political patrons across two Indian cities. Briefly, we find patrons strongly prefer loyal brokers, and not simply brokers who are popular with clients. We suggest this preference reflects the high threat of broker exit under conditions of inter-party competition and intra-party factionalism. Further, we find that patrons value a broker’s everyday problem-solving efficacy more highly than their election-time mobilizing efficacy. We validate our experimental findings against actual broker promotion patterns in our study cities, drawing on data from a unique survey of 629 brokers operating within migrant slums.

Using over one million survey responses and machine learning to learn what happened in the 2016 and 2018 election, why nobody saw Trump coming, and how data science is being used in the 2020 election

Like all computerized systems, ballot-marking devices (BMDs) can be hacked, misprogrammed, and misconfigured. BMD printout might not reflect what the BMD screen or audio conveyed to the voter. If voters complain that BMDs misbehaved, officials have no way to tell whether BMDs malfunctioned, the voters erred, or the voters are attempting to cast doubt on the election. Several approaches to testing BMDs have been proposed. In pre-election logic and accuracy (L&A) tests, trusted agents input known test patterns into the BMD and check whether the printout matches. In parallel or live testing, trusted agents use the BMDs on election day, emulating voters. In passive testing, trusted agents monitor the rate at which voters “spoil” ballots and request another opportunity to mark a ballot: an anomalously high rate might result from BMD malfunctions. In practice, none of these methods can protect against outcome-altering problems. L&A testing is ineffective against malware in part because BMDs “know” the time and date of the test and the election. Neither L&A nor parallel testing can probe even a small fraction of the combinations of voter preferences, device settings, ballot language, duration of voter interaction, input and output interfaces, and other variables that could comprise enough votes to change outcomes. Under mild assumptions, to develop a model of voter interactions with BMDs accurate enough to ensure that parallel tests could reliably detect changes to 5% of the votes (which could change margins by 10% or more) would require monitoring the behavior of more than a million voters in each jurisdiction in minute detail—but the median turnout by jurisdiction in the U.S. is under 3000 voters, and 2/3 of U.S. jurisdictions have fewer than 43,000 active voters. Moreover, all voter privacy would be lost. Given an accurate model of voter behavior, the number of tests required is still larger than the turnout in a typical U.S. jurisdiction. Even if less testing sufficed, it would require extra BMDs, new infrastructure for creating test interactions and reporting test results, additional polling-place staff, and more training. Under optimistic assumptions, passive testing that has a 99% chance of detecting a 1% change to the margin with a 1% false alarm rate is impossible in jurisdictions with fewer than about 1 million voters, even if the “normal” spoiled ballot rate were known exactly and did not vary from election to election and place to place. Passive testing would also require training and infrastructure to monitor the spoiled ballot rate in real time. And if parallel or passive testing discovers a problem, the only remedy is a new election: there is no way to reconstruct the correct election result from an untrustworthy paper trail. Minimizing the number of votes cast using BMDs is prudent election administration.

This project investigates the role of place-based identification in influencing Americans’ racial attitudes and policy preferences. Specifically, I argue that Southern identity (i.e., identification with the American South) is an influential but omitted factor in the study of political behavior across racial groups. In this project, I create a novel survey measurement of Southern identity and assess its impact on public opinion. Contrary to the extant literature, this work argues that Southern identity has political consequences for the opinion formation of Black Americans as well as for White Americans. I expect that Southern identity will be associated with group-centric racial beliefs reflecting the perceived communalistic nature of Southern culture. Analyses from three original surveys suggest that Southern identity influences both Black and Whites to adopt distinct racial beliefs different from their non-southern racial group members. These results hint at a challenge to the claim that Southern identity among Black Americans is not as politically relevant as it is for White Americans. This work also speaks to the need for more nuanced approaches to understanding American’s racial beliefs across race and place.

Do refugees reshape long-term political behavior in receiving areas? To investigate this question, I examine the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into West Germany at the end of WWII. Expellees were strangers to the cultural practices in their new surroundings. Tensions with natives forced expellees to rely on each other and helped foster a strong group identity. I argue that this shared identity, coupled with political circumstances specific to Germany, engendered support for the radical right among expellees. Using district-level data from 32 elections spanning 100 years, I find that communities which received greater shares of expellees remain more supportive of the radical right in the short, medium, and long term. This legacy of forced migration responds to changes in the political context within Germany, and is driven primarily by districts that received greater shares of expellees who were not citizens of the Third Reich during the interwar period.