Voter Behavior in the Wake of Punitive Policies

Abstract

Millions of people in the US have direct experience with the machinery of immigration enforcement or criminal courts, and millions more have seen family members, friends, or neighbors face these experiences. What do these experiences mean for political behavior in the United States? Do these proximate observers decide that government is a dangerous and capricious force to be avoided, and withdraw from political participation entirely? Or is there sometimes a mobilization response, where some people organize to push back against what they see as unjust government actions? This is an important policy feedback story. Large-scale punitive policies could either "lock themselves in" via community disengagement, or hasten their own demise by fueling political responses. The three papers of this dissertation examine policies at varying distances (people living in an area where the policy is introduced, those directly affected, and those living with people directly affected), and with different timeframes and geographic coverage. The results of these papers, and the approach of using administrative datasets and finding causal leverage from "natural experiments," point us toward a new understanding of policy feedbacks. In the first paper, I find that Latino voters living in counties where a new deportation program was introduced before the 2010 election became more likely to vote. This effect seems driven not by personal experience seeing deportation activities, but by activists mobilizing voters in affected counties. In the second paper, I use random courtroom assignment to measure the causal effect of short jail sentences (from misdemeanor cases) on voting. I find that even short jail sentences can deter people from voting in the next election, with particularly large effects among black voters. In the third paper, I find that the household members of incarcerated people also become several percentage points less likely to vote. This finding is particularly striking given the narrow scope of the effect measured: this is only the additional effect of seeing a household member jailed for a short period, among a set of people that have already seen their household member arrested and charged with a crime.