Person:

Palmer, Maxwell

Limited time is an important constraint and resource that is fundamental to governing. This dissertation studies the connection between limited time and political power in three different contexts.

Lobbying presents an attractive post-congressional career, with some former congressional members and staffers transitioning to lucrative lobbying careers. Precisely why congressional experience is valued is a matter of ongoing debate. Building on research positing a relationship between political uncertainty and demand for lobbyists, we examine conditions under which lobbyists with past congressional experience prove most valuable. To assess lobbyist earnings, we develop a new measure, Lobbyist Value Added, that reflects the marginal contribution of each lobbyist on a contract, and show that previous measures understate the value of high-performing lobbyists. We find that former staffers earn revenues above their peers during times of uncertainty and former members of Congress generate higher revenue overall, which we identify by comparing revenues generated by individuals who narrowly won election to those who narrowly lost. These findings help characterize when lobbyists with different skillsets prove most valuable and the value added by government experience.

Former government officials have many different opportunities to cash in on their public service, but most academic research and government ethics regulations focus on lobbying. We argue that this focus understates the extent and diversity of employment opportunities available to former officials. Using a new data set of officeholders in American government (members of Congress, governors, members of the Cabinet, executive branch officials, and ambassadors), we show that, with the exception of members of the House, former officials are more likely to join boards of public companies than they are to work as a registered lobbyist. Furthermore, former officials join boards more quickly and face fewer ethics regulations compared to lobbying. Increasing restrictions on lobbying also appears to push former officials towards alternative employment such as board service. Our findings demonstrate the breadth of the labor market for former politicians and suggest fruitful new avenues for research on political careers.

Does family history matter for policy making in democracies? Linking members of Congress (MCs) to the census, we observe countries of birth for members, their parents, and their grandparents, allowing us to measure ancestry for the politicians in office when U.S. immigration policy changed dramatically, from closing the border in the 1920s to reshaping admittance criteria in the 1960s. We find that legislators descended from immigrant parents or grandparents support more permissive immigration legislation. They are also less likely to speak negatively about immigration in speeches before Congress. A regression discontinuity design analyzing close elections, which addresses district-level selection and holds district composition constant, confirms our results on roll call voting and speech. Efforts to account for selection into immigration-such as comparing international immigrants to domestic migrants and exploiting variation in restrictive legislation targeting specific regions of origin-further confirm the relationship between family immigration experience and more permissive stances on immigration policy. We then explore mechanisms, finding support for in-group identity in connecting family history with policy making. MCs name their children in ways that express immigrant identity, and immigrant-descended MCs discuss immigration using more personal frames, emphasizing family over economic considerations. Our findings illustrate the important role of personal background in legislative behavior in democratic societies, even on major and controversial topics like immigration, and suggest how experiences transmitted from previous generations can inform lawmakers' views.

Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define-Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of 2N equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors.

We frequently observe that politicians accept lucrative private sector employment after leaving office, but we have little systematic evidence that politicians are able to profit from their government service. In this paper we examine the returns to office that many former senators and governors receive from serving on the boards of directors of publicly traded corporations, part-time positions where the average compensation exceeds $250,000 per year. We find that almost half of all former senators and governors serve on at least one board after leaving office. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we estimate that winning a Senate or gubernatorial election increases the probability of later serving on a corporate board by roughly 30%. For senators, we find that developing skills and connections through committee service, particularly in areas such as finance or military, is associated with increased board service after leaving office.

We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders: electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward-looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elections. We show that, when map drawers are unconstrained, the ability to create durable majorities is so widespread that at least one party in every state can draw a map where a majority of legislative districts withstand almost any likely future electoral swing. Enacted maps are less durable, due to a combination of underlying geography, voter partisanship, and state-level guidelines. This paper provides the theoretical framework and empirical tools to understand which gerrymandered maps enable state-level majorities to emerge and to endure.