A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the punitive turn is characterized by divergence in death penalty support between Black and White people, and that White Southerners grew more supportive than Whites in the non-South from before to after the turn. Additional tests identify that this regional divergence is unlikely to have arisen by chance. Heterogeneity in partisanship and responsiveness to regional violent crime support is consistent with the idea that crime rates themselves were meaningful in punitive attitude formation only insofar as they were mediated by additional socio-political forces.

We argue that the Great Reform Act’s suffrage provisions were part of a broader effort to constrain the executive, thereby enabling an expansion in the state’s repressive ca- pacity. When they came to power, the Whigs first increased parliament’s power over the purse; and then bolstered its independence from the Crown and its patronal peers by reforming parliamentary elections. These reforms to constrain the executive were followed almost immediately by substantial investments in the state’s policing capacity. Professional police forces had been stoutly opposed by the gentry since the Glorious Revolution on the grounds that they would increase Crown power too much. Once budgets and elections had been reformed at all levels of governance (national, munici- pal and county), taxpayers could be confident that their elected representatives would control the finances of the new forces—and so professional police forces were established in all major British towns.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) fundamentally changed the distribution of electoral power in the US South.  We examine the consequences of this mass enfranchisement of Blacks for the use of the carceral state---police, the courts, and the prison system.  We study the extent to which White Southern elites turned to the carceral state as a tool of Black political suppression when the VRA rendered Jim Crow policies unusable. To systematically test this, use new historical data on state and county prison intake data by race (~1940-1985) in a series of difference-in-differences designs. We find that states covered by Section 5 of the VRA experienced a differential increase in Black prison admissions relative to those that were not covered, and that incarceration varied systematically in proportion to the electoral threat posed by Black voters.  Our findings indicate the potentially perverse consequences of enfranchisement when establishment power seeks---and finds---other outlets of social and political control.

How do changes in Election Day polling place locations affect voter turnout? We study the behavior of more than 2 million eligible voters across three closely-contested presidential elections (2008-2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting on average statewide. However, this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting, suggesting that voters, on average, respond to a change in their polling place by choosing to vote early. While there is heterogeneity in these effects by the distance of the polling place change and the race of the affected voter, the fully offsetting substitution into early voting still obtains. We theorize this is because voters whose polling places change location receive notification mailers, offsetting search costs and priming them to think about the election before election day, driving early voting.

Do local election administrators change precincts and Election Day polling place locations to target voters based on their partisanship or race? We systematically evaluate whether decisions consistent with targeting occur using the near universe of eligible voters, polling place locations, and precinct boundaries across three presidential elections in the closely contested state of North Carolina. We find no evidence that local administrators allocate precincts and polling places in a manner consistent with partisan manipulation for electoral gain. Some counties appear to differentially target opposition party voters with these changes, but the county-level variation we document is likely due to random variation rather than deliberate manipulation. There is also little evidence that the removal of minority voter protections in Shelby County v. Holder impacted polling place placement. If partisan-motivated precinct or polling place decisions occur in North Carolina, they are seemingly more idiosyncratic than pervasive.

Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions—those deemed perniciously politically discriminatory to minorities—to preclear changes to their voting practices with the Department of Justice. By exploiting the use of a federally imposed threshold for how Section 5 coverage was applied in North Carolina, this article estimates the effect of coverage using a difference-in-differences design. This article finds that Section 5 coverage increased black voter registration by 14–19 percentage points, white registration by 10–13 percentage points, and overall voter turnout by 10–19 percentage points. Additional results for Democratic vote share suggest that some of this overall increase in turnout may have come from reactionary whites. This article finds that Section 5 coverage had a statistically and substantively meaningful effect on enfranchisement, although an effect consistent with the more modest of extant estimates in the literature.

This paper considers the contribution of population growth and urbanization---key processes of modernization---to political competition and the characteristics of political representatives in Britain, the first country to undergo a modern transformation in population geography. I use an original dataset of Member of Parliament (MP) biographical information to measure political contestation, the presence of political dynasties, and the circulation of new economic interests through political power. Leveraging sub-national variation in population change and urbanization in the 19th century, I find that these revolutions diversified the economic interests of MPs, increased electoral contests and reduced the presence of political dynasties and other traditional elites. Democratic reform augmented, but was not the sole force driving these processes of political development. Even after accounting for growth in the non-agricultural working class, population geography played a critical role in driving new representation. I interpret this as evidence in support of modernization theory, albeit at a different level of aggregation---economic modernization in the British Isles broke entrenched elites' hold on political representation.

This paper considers the consequences of Britain's 17th century dramatic expansion of overseas trade for the persistence and turnover of political elites. I study the extent to which ``new'' commercial economic interests---that is, individuals involved in expanding trade---obtained Parliamentary representation, as well as the extent to which those individuals were connected to members of the incumbent political elite as family dynasties or via shared social class. I do so using an original individual-level dataset on the characteristics of British Members of Parliament (MPs) spanning more than two centuries (1550-1750). Despite the dramatic expansion of trade during the period, I find that only a modest share of Parliament represented the growing commercial sector, and there was limited associated turnover in the social and family backgrounds of MPs. Elite turnover was more likely when trade demanded fundamentally new skills and new modes of production, and after institutional changes de-regulated the early British state's tendency towards monopoly protection in trade. Broadly, I find that elites persisted across the economic changes of the long 17th century, and were well-positioned to capture many of the early gains for themselves.

How do democratically-elected politicians survive being removed from power by an authoritarian regime? We investigate the determinants of political survival across Chile’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), which disbanded the national legislature and disrupted sources of political dominance. We collect individual-level biographical data on the universe of deputies and senators in Chile’s National Congress and archival data on the experiences of those politicians under the Pinochet regime —-- including whether pre-1973 politicians were incorporated into the Pinochet government, sent into exile abroad, or employed in the domestic private sector. Among politicians on the ideological left, we show that exiled politicians were just as electorally successful as those leftist politicians who remained in the domestic private sector. Moreover, while we find evidence that politicians who found positions within the Pinochetregime were more likely to win elections after democratization than their counterparts on the right who did not, this relationship is a consequence of which politicians were selected by the regime. Although political dynasties are an important feature of Chilean politics, we do not document an important role of this familial power in moderating the effect of trajectories or providing an alternative method of political survival.

Many theoretical treatments of the selection of political representatives assume the institution of an election in which a contest can occur---that is, a situation in which more than one candidate vie for a seat in a representative institution. Despite the importance of electoral institutions to our theoretical understanding of much of politics---both democracy and electoral authoritarianism---the origin of these institutions is far less understood. In this paper I consider the origin of contests in electoral institutions. I collect new data on the universe of candidate selections from approximately 1400 to 1700 in England and Wales, covering the period in which the first contests are historically recorded. With this data, I evaluate two competing theoretical accounts of contest emergence in this historical context: first, that contests emerged as a response to the changing economic environment brought about by expanding overseas trade in the late 16th and early 17th centuries; and second, that contests emerged due to the expansion of the gentry as former Catholic lands were redistributed following the Reformation. Evaluating these theories speaks directly to the relative economic and social importance of early representative institutions; the latter of which has been far less appreciated in contemporary political economy scholarship. The paper contributes to our understanding of the long-run process of democratic development broadly by evaluating one of the most important of its constituent institutions.

Politics in developing states is often characterized by informal personalistic relationships. These ``traditional'' institutions structure political relationships---facilitating the exchange of both standard political and economic goods such as votes and labor, as well as more amorphous goods such as loyalty and deference. This project traces the evolution of one such personalistic political institution in the British Isles---the relationship between political patron and parliamentary client (MP)---from the late 14th century to the Great Reform Act. The project does so using individual-level data on the universe of MPs serving over this ~500 year period, the presence (or absence) of a patronage relationship, the type of patron (e.g. aristocrat, government), the spatial relationship of each patron and client, and the strength of the patronage relationship. These descriptive statistics on the evolution of this institution then give rise to a series of causal questions about the role of formal institutional change and economic development in transforming traditional institutions. In both describing the evolution of patronage and probing the causes of its change, the project looks to contribute to our understanding of institutional evolution and political development simultaneously at a micro (individual-level) and macro (multi-century) scale largely missing from the literature.

The US Congress is one of the most important political institutions in the nation and one of the dominant subjects of research in political science.  Yet, despite the more than 200 year history of the institution, we know almost nothing about the voters represented by congresspeople in that institution before the mid-20th century.  Our project builds the first dataset on the demographic characteristics of the population in each congressional district in every year since 1789.   This comprehensive dataset allows us to answer a set of simple but never-before-answerable questions about the extent to which Congress represents urban and rural populations through its history; the way in which Congress represents immigrant and minority populations through its history; and the extent to which Congressional and Presidential voting is misaligned.  In addition to these descriptive questions, our project looks to understand the long-run effect of redistricting in terms of how it privileged some populations at the expense of others, and the way in which that in turn translated into different electoral outcomes in Congress.  

Does enhanced political representation of racial minorities lead to changes in racial disparities in police behavior? Standard theories of representation--and recent scholarship--suggest that minority office-holding should, and does sometimes result in reductions in unwanted disparities in police behavior---particularly when minority officeholders are in the majority (see, e.g., Eckhouse 2016). Yet, despite this, we also know that the police operate with significant bureaucratic discretion independent of elected representatives, and that attempts to reform the police or change their behavior have experienced limited success (see e.g., Eberhardt et. al. 2004). Police, and carceral institutions more generally, are also potential tools of social control for existing elites challenged by a politically powerful minority (Eubank & Fresh 2020). Thus, minority---and even majority minority---representation may struggle to affect police behavior. Empirically evaluating these cross-cutting predictions is made challenging by the fact that those factors that allow minority groups to successfully obtain representation are also likely to affect police behavior via other channels, confounding causal inference. In this paper, we leverage the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) which mandated that approximately 100 municipalities move from at-large elections to single member districts to better estimate the causal effect of political representation on police behavior. Existing work has documented that the CVRA increased minority representation in substantively meaningful ways (Collingwood & Long 2019; Abbott & Magazinnik 2020; Hankinson & Magazinnik 2020). We build on these findings by using data on CVRA coverage, voter turnout by race at the local level, the race of city council members, and police arrests (focusing on the relative rate of minor, or “nuisance” arrests, that are more likely to be subject to discretion). Employing a difference-in-differences design, we evaluate how these representational changes affected police arrest behavior, not only when minority representation increases on the margins but also when city councils become majority-minority. Our work builds on important work in the realm of representation and police behavior by bringing to bear a new design to estimate the counterfactual of how police behave in the absence of minority representation, and improving our understanding of how the specific policy remedy of redistricting might affect policing outcomes.

Racial inequality is a deep and persistent feature of the contemporary American carceral state. Prominent theories root these inequalities in reaction to the passage of Black civil and voting rights in 1964-5. Our research seeks to identify the role of police funding in this argued punitive turn. We look to understand both (1) the way in which race-specific factors (e.g., legacies of slavery, reaction to the Civil Rights movement) determined where police capacity was built after 1965, and (2) the consequences of those expenditures for racial inequalities in both policing and incarceration outcomes. We aim to to do this by examining expenditures from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)---the unprecedented federal police grant program begun in 1968 that fundamentally transformed American policing. We plan to link these expenditures to newly collected racially-disaggregated micro-data on each police arrests and prison admissions. We then aim to analyze the effect of the LEAA on these outcomes with a series of difference-in-difference designs to best-draw causal inferences from observational data. Our research aims to contribute needed rigorous scientific evidence to debates about the origins of the race-based carceral state and contemporary calls to ``de-fund'' the police stemming from the police killings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and many others. These calls to ``defund the police'' are premised on the hope that changing resource allocations can change racial inequality in the carceral state, but evidence to support such claims to currently lacking.