American political polarization has mapped onto educational pedigree, with credentialed elites increasingly supporting Democrats. We examine the implications of this trend in the most powerful office in American politics: the White House. From 1995 to 2024, we show Democratic presidents employed staffs with higher educational attainment, and that Republicans were more likely to attend public institutions, those without R1 status, and those ranked below the top 50%. We then show that universities whose alumni disproportionately went on to work for Democratic presidents were more likely to face investigations, enforcement actions, and funding cuts after President Trump took office in 2025. Our findings suggest educational pedigree among staff who operate key political institutions warrant further investigation.

Felon disenfranchisement laws can alter the composition of the electorate. Accordingly, we argue that in states with such laws, elected prosecutors may be tempted to assign felon status strategically. We test our argument using criminal case data from Virginia and leveraging a sudden policy change—unexpectedly announced by the Governor on April 22, 2016—enfranchising all felons upon completion of their prison or probation sentence. Using well-known racial differences in partisanship as a measure of likely political alignment, we show that the announcement corresponded to an increase in criminal charge severity and sentence length for defendants who were politically unaligned with their prosecutors, and a decrease for aligned defendants. Evidence suggests that these changes may have been partially motivated by partisan concerns in the lead-up to the 2016 federal elections.

How we measure racial bias matters. Previous literature demonstrates that direct questioning leads to unreliable responses. Scholars have thus developed a number of techniques to uncover racial bias without cuing a defensive response. I investigate the performance of text- and image-based factorial experiments in the case of racial motivation for opposition to new housing development relative to a more traditional list experiment. My results demonstrate that these often-used methods yield substantially different conclusions about the importance of racial biases in opposition to new housing construction. While the factorial experiments suggest little evidence of racial bias, the more traditional list experiment reveals that the potential for racial change in their neighborhood is a concern for a meaningful share of respondents.

Using the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child as a frame of reference, this essay examines current Supreme Court decisions and Congressional bills in order to highlight the struggles over the bodies and minds of young people in the United States. It uses Barbara Kruger’s 1989 artwork, “Untitled (Your body is a battleground),” to link the struggles for reproductive and bodily autonomy for women with parallel struggles for the bodily autonomy of young people.

Experimental researchers often need to assess the moderating effect of racial attitudes. However, it is unclear whether the racial attitude battery deployed may bias treatment effects. Less subtle batteries could bias treatment effects toward zero if measuring racial attitudes primes these attitudes for subjects assigned to all conditions, including the control condition. We assess whether bias is introduced across four conditions, pre-treatment: not measuring racial attitudes, using stereotype endorsement measures, using the American National Election Study racial resentment battery, or using the simplified Cooperative Election Study racial resentment battery. We do not uncover widespread instances of treatment bias. However, we do identify bias when the stereotype endorsement measures are used pre-treatment. We conclude with recommendations for researchers.

Do women candidate’s parental status, whether childfree, pregnant, or a mother, influence how U.S. voters evaluate their leadership, commitment, and policy expertise at the state executive and legislative levels? Using data from a nationally representative survey experiment, I assess how voters rate these candidates’ competencies. Regardless of partisanship, I find voters reduce support for pregnant candidates, particularly at the executive level, due to concerns about time availability. I also discover a parenthood timing gap effect — while pregnancy is perceived as a limitation to do the job as an elected official, having young children as a mother enhances leadership evaluations, at least among Democrats. A partisan divide emerges, with Democrats rating maternal-cuing candidates higher on leadership competencies compared to Republicans. This research has important implications for how candidates need to strategize their presentation as we see more women and (expecting) mothers run for all types of office.

Voters must often resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and the one likeliest to win an election. Researchers know surprisingly little about how voters even conceptualize electability, let alone make these decisions. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy agreement and electability in their decisions. The first experiment presents respondents with policy agreement between themselves and candidates and candidates’ electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare. We show that while making electability information salient modestly reduces support for candidates with limited prospects, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated. Additionally, we show that respondents actually construe electability as a signal about a candidate’s qualifications rather than as a signal about getting votes.

How can we measure the effects of campaign events? We estimate how voters respond to a prominent campaign scandal—Donald Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records—using data from a large, eight-wave panel study with waves fielded before, during, and after the verdict. We find the trial had virtually no effect on Trump supporters, even those who reported their support was conditional on an acquittal. We compare this precisely estimated null to estimates from popular cross-sectional methods, which fail to replicate it. The “change” question format estimates a 6% increase in support, while the “counterfactual” survey experimental design estimates a 10% decrease. We formalize the estimands each method estimates and discuss implications for the event study literature.

This research note investigates how the involvement of firms in American politics has developed over the past two decades. The central question is whether individual firms have become more active lobbyists compared to business associations in the US Congress over this period. Different subdisciplines in political science have various expectations regarding the evolution of firm lobbying. We test which perspective is most accurate. To evaluate the hypotheses, we use a novel dataset comprising approximately 180,000 instances of lobbying activity by different types of interest organizations across a wide range of sectors and issues. In our analyses, we trace both the relative activity of firms versus business associations and their centrality in lobbying networks. While most theoretical models in the literature suggest a rise of firm lobbying activity, our results highlight a strikingly stable pattern of firm lobbying activity and centrality within the US political system over the past two decades.

The literature on American politics widely agrees that early victories in U.S. presidential primaries are pivotal for securing the nomination, a belief that underpins the front-loading behavior of states. However, demonstrating this success-breeds-success effect is challenging because unobserved candidate qualities could independently link early victories to later success. To address this, we used a regression-discontinuity design, focusing on variations near the victory threshold. Our analysis shows that conclusions about early states rely heavily on limited observations around the cutoff. If any inference is to be drawn, it is that winning in Iowa or New Hampshire has no lasting impact on subsequent contests, nor does winning on any election day affect outcomes on the next. These findings question the presence of momentum effects for winners in the primaries.

Both academic researchers and political pundits have generally accepted two over-time features of persuasion by partisan media: that the persuasive effects of partisan media might be temporary and decay quickly after a single exposure, and that these effects accumulate from multiple exposures. That effects decay may serve to ameliorate concerns about the broad impact of such media on partisan polarization. Yet the assumption that persuasive effects accumulate may raise larger concerns from real-world repeat exposure. To explore these possibilities, we implement a novel set of multiwave experiments that allow us to examine concerns about media effects over time. We present estimates from three studies suggesting that the persuasive effect of exposure to just a short article or video clip can persist for up to a week. In contrast to this persistence, our results suggest that an experiment adequately powered to detect the cumulative effect from multiple doses of partisan media—let alone one powered to detect cumulative effects among subgroups of the population—would require an unrealistic number of respondents. These cumulative effects are thus difficult to test in an experimental setting with limited resources.

District-based elections are a central feature of local governance throughout the United States. Prior work has explored whether district-based elections impact racial/ethnic descriptive representation in local office; much less is known about the impacts of local district-based elections on other dimensions of representation. We consider another such dimension: socioeconomic class. To explore how district-based elections shape the composition of locally elected officials on class dimensions, we focus on city councils and study the dramatic shift towards district-based elections in California in the 2010s. We construct a statewide mapping of newly drawn council districts; we also draw on rich and partially hand-collected data on council candidates and members. We find that district-based elections increase the share of candidates and council members from lower-income and higher renter share neighborhoods, and lead to fewer members with business backgrounds.

How do partisan differences in mass behavior and attitudes vary across contexts? Using new individual-level panel data on the COVID-19 pandemic from 54,216 US adults between March 2020 and September 2021, we consider how partisan differences vary according to the personal costs and benefits of behaviors, their public symbolism, and elite-level policy choices. Employing various panel data estimators, including difference-in-differences, we evaluate how partisan gaps evolve across changes to the political and health contexts, including the national vaccine rollout, individual vaccination status, and within-state policy variation. We find partisan divides are substantial even in (ostensibly) apolitical domains, although they are tempered by higher net personal costs to actions, lower public symbolism, and elite policy choices that counter national party cues.

Scholars typically assume that congressional party leaders whip their members and influence their voting behavior, but little evidence convincingly separates the effects of party leaders from the selection of members into parties. I find that a switch from a relatively moderate to a relatively extreme party leader causes rank-and-file members to cast more extreme roll-call votes (and vice versa). I further find that party leaders even influence the members who did not support their leadership bid, and rank-and-file members are less likely to cast partisan votes when there is no party leader. This study also sheds light on a historically anomalous period of Republican moderation, and it helps to explain the increase in congressional polarization over the past 50 years.

Do voters punish local politicians for raising taxes? In California, proposed tax increases must be approved via local ballot measures. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the narrow passage of local tax initiatives, we find that incumbents do not generally suffer a penalty when cities raise taxes, with the notable exception of business taxes. We explore several mechanisms behind this result and uncover suggestive evidence that business interests may be particularly likely to mobilize following a tax increase. These results suggest that interest groups likely play an important role in determining whether new taxes generate voter backlash.

Inattentive survey respondents are a growing concern for social scientists who rely on online surveys for their research. While inattentiveness has been well documented in lower quality sample sources, there is less understanding of how common the phenomenon is in high-quality surveys. We document the presence of a small percentage of respondents in Cooperative Election Study surveys who pass quality control measures but still exhibit inattentive behavior. We show that these respondents may affect public opinion estimates for small subgroups. Finally, we present the results from an experiment testing whether inattentive respondents can be encouraged to pay more attention, but we find that such an intervention fails.

What does a democratically-productive form of mourning look like in America? David McIvor’s Mourning in America and Simon Stow’s American Mourning argue that it entails the embrace of ambivalence about self and other. Democratically-productive mourning pushes against the tendencies toward idealization and demonization. Embracing ambivalence enables us to move to more effective political engagement in the context of both collaboration and conflict. It allows us to understand that the process of mourning must be ongoing both to protect us from political excesses to which we are prone and to push society toward justice.

The state of American politics would be improved, many argue, if more moderate and qualified people served in government. We investigate what draws such individuals to run, focusing on a dimension of politics that has received scant attention within the candidate-entry literature—the ability of candidates, once elected, to exercise meaningful influence over policy. In a conjoint experiment, we find that the opportunity to wield greater authority differentially increases moderates’ interest in seeking office, and that more qualified people express more interest in running for offices with greater authority, lower thresholds for passing legislation, and higher staff support. These findings have implications for political representation, government effectiveness, and the relationship between institutional reform and mass politics.

Recent scholarship highlights that executive orders issued by the president are not truly ‘unilateral,’ but require cooperation from administrative agencies for implementation. I argue that, because of this role for agencies, congressional committees can use oversight to shape executive order implementation. I demonstrate this dynamic using two datasets: a sample of executive orders that have been coded using measures of executive-branch delegation and discretion, and a collection of congressional hearings focusing on an executive order or its implementation. I find that Congress engages in more oversight activity when an order delegates more authority and a wider discretionary window to agencies. This finding reveals a previously overlooked form of interbranch conflict, and broadens our understanding of the politics of unilateralism.