Peer-Reviewed
Peer-Reviewed
Does money in politics affect democratic performance? I study the effect of the Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down existing state bans on independent campaign expenditures, on democracy in the U.S. states. Results from a difference-in-differences design suggest that the Citizens United ruling did have a substantial negative effect on state democratic performance, and that this effect is largely independent of the effect of Republican party control identified by previous research. The results suggest that unlimited political spending may pose a threat to the health of democracy in the United States.
Balancing the Electorate: The Differential Turnout Effects of Automatic Voter Registration
Which electoral reforms affect turnout and contribute to a more representative electorate? An emerging theory predicts that reforms affecting the cost of voter registration, in contrast to reforms affecting the cost of submitting a ballot, are most impactful—especially for lower turnout groups such as young people. In this article, I use survey and voter file data to study a new registration-based reform, automatic voter registration (AVR). Difference-in-differences results show that the positive turnout effects of AVR are concentrated among younger voters, with those aged 18–24 receiving the largest boost. I also find suggestive evidence that minority voters experience greater turnout gains from AVR than their white counterparts. Together, these findings indicate that registration-based policy interventions such as AVR could be a promising avenue for reducing longstanding compositional biases within the electorate.
A House Divided: Partisan Mismatch, Abortion Bans, and Relationship Duration (with Ernesto Tiburcio)
This paper studies politically mismatched couples among American voters. We assemble registration records for around 60 million couples between 2014 and 2024 and document that those with different party registrations are over 14% less likely to remain together by the following election. This pattern is consistent across states and robust to a host of other couple characteristics and local conditions. We identify the role of politically salient environments using the sudden criminalization of abortion in 13 states between the 2020 and 2022 elections. Compared to states that did not ban abortion, newly formed mismatched couples were over 11% less likely to remain together in 2022, with no significant previous or subsequent differences. Matched couples are not more likely to separate in treated states, and mismatched couples in states with abortion bans in 2023 and 2024 are not affected in 2022.