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Schneer, Benjamin

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.

For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for partial representation of the marginalized and unenfranchised? We address these questions by analyzing the Congressional Petitions Database (CPD), an original endeavor tracking virtually every petition introduced to Congress from 1789 to 1949. Our analyses document how (1) two important groups of unenfranchised constituents – Native Americans and women – petitioned regularly and (2) Congress’s initial treatment of Natives’ and women’s petitions was similar to that of all others, thus offering systematic evidence highlighting the petition’s role as a mechanism for representation among otherwise unenfranchised groups.

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.

Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down-ballot candidates to low-quality or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co-partisan vote shares in down-ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top-of-the-ticket candidates influence down-ballot outcomes, after accounting for correlations in candidate quality/ideology across offices, we estimate near-zero statewide top-of-the-ticket effects on U.S. House elections. We similarly observe near-zero top-of-the-ticket effects in the further-down-ballot settings of state-legislative and county-legislative elections. Overall, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice throughout the time period under investigation. However, in line with other research, this link between candidate quality/ideology and election outcomes has weakened considerably in recent years.

Legislative leaders tend to be ideologically more extreme than their median members. Why? This paper shows that party members select extreme leaders as a strategic measure to anchor negotiations. Anchoring succeeds because the opposition understands that such leaders will not compromise on moderate legislation. Hence, rank-and-file members balance their own ideologies, and their assessments of political feasibility and institutional conditions, to select leaders who will pull agreements towards the ideal point of their median party member. Congressional voting data since 1900 confirms this account. When parties have selected extreme leaders, passed legislation aligns more closely with the preferences of the median caucus member. Party members also acknowledge the benefits of extreme leaders, referring to them more positively in newsletters sent to constituents. Such extremeness has the consequence, however, that less legislation gets passed. Additional comparative statics align with an account where institutional conditions can constrain the extremeness of leaders selected.

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 use 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.

Does personal and family history influence legislative behavior in democracies? Linking members of Congress 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 American immigration policy changed dramatically, from closing the border in the 1920s to reshaping admittance criteria in the 1960s. We find that legislators more proximate to the immigrant experience support more permissive immigration legislation. A regression discontinuity design analyzing close elections, which addresses selection bias and holds district composition constant, confirms our results. We then explore mechanisms, finding support for in-group identity in connecting family history with policymaking. Holding fixed family history, legislators with more visible indicators of immigration based on surnames are even more supportive of permissive immigration legislation. However, a common immigrant identity can break down along narrower ethnic lines when restrictive legislation targets specific countries. 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 lawmakers' views are informed by experiences transmitted from previous generations.

Independent redistricting in practice has proven remarkably successful along several dimensions. This policy brief outlines key lessons learned from redistricting in Arizona, a state with a five-person independent redistricting commission. Based on a mix of empirical evidence and first-hand experience, we argue that Arizona’s approach to redistricting increases transparency through public engagement and participation in the mapping process; fosters increased competition in districts, which has several effects thought to be beneficial for democratic representation; contributes to higher levels of compactness (i.e., how far the district extends from its center) in newly-drawn districts and promotes partisan fairness in the state as a whole; and benefits from its multi-partisan composition and ought to be insulated from legislative interference.

The electoral system is often treated as fixed, but throughout U.S. history significant changes in electoral institutions, or in political conditions dictated by electoral institutions, make it possible to identify more precisely the role that the electoral system plays in the democratic process. This dissertation examines three related questions, each focusing on an aspect of the influence of electoral rules on political behavior. How has the ability to directly elect representatives influenced other forms of citizen engagement with government? How has competitiveness influenced voter turnout? Finally, when separate elections lead to differences in partisan control over the branches of government, what is the effect on policymaking in Congress?

The first chapter shows that petitioning campaigns have historically substituted for the communication and accountability obtained through direct elections. I estimate that rates of petitioning to the Senate declined by 30% when the passage of the 17th Amendment ended the practice of indirect election by state legislatures and replaced it with direct elections. The implication is that electoral reforms meant to improve representation may weaken other ties between citizens and lawmakers.

The second chapter examines the relationship between electoral competition and turnout. Past research has found that citizens vote at higher rates in response to closer elections, either through instrumental voting at the individual level or through voter mobilization by elites. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates that citizens living in competitive congressional districts differ markedly from those in uncompetitive districts along a range of dimensions other than turnout. Using an individual panel based on voter files from all 50 states and exploiting variation in competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle yields a precisely estimated null effect of competitiveness on turnout.

The third chapter re-examines whether divided government reduces legislative productivity. After developing the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress---from 1789-2010---this chapter shows that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the 19th Century and four additional such acts in the 20th Century. However, party control of government cannot explain the broad historical trends in the rate at which Congress passes significant legislation.

The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation’s history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials – including an original dataset of 2,157 petitions sent to the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1920 concerning women’s voting rights – we focus on woman suffrage petitioning as both presaging the practice of voting and, in a sense, preparing tens of thousands of women for that activity. Our analyses reveal that, before 1920, suffrage petitioning activity was heightened in general and midterm election years (especially among Republican-leaning constituencies), that suffrage petitioning both enabled and reflected organization in critical western states, and that post-suffrage women’s turnout was immediately and significantly higher in states with greater pre-suffrage petitioning (controlling for a range of political, organizational and demographic variables). In its claims, its symbolism, its habits and its temporality, suffrage petitioning differed from other petitioning in American political development, and marked a formative practice for women on their way to voting.