We examine how special interests, measured by campaign contributions from the mortgage industry, and constituent interests, measured by the share of subprime borrowers in a congressional district, may have influenced U.S. government policy toward subprime mortgage credit expansion from 2002 to...

This article addresses the question of whether incumbents can buy political support through targeted public spending. Using a regression discontinuity approach which takes advantage of the design of a recent Romanian government program that distributed coupons worth 200 Euros to poor families...

Colonial institutions are thought to be an important determinates of post-independence levels of political stability, economic growth, and public goods provision. In particular, many scholars have suggested that British institutional and cultural legacies are more conducive to growth than those...

Is it feasible in the current United States to administer voter identification laws in a race-neutral manner? We study this question using rigorous field methods and state-of-the-art statistical techniques, thus accounting for sources of uncertainty (including survey non-response and clustering)...

This paper formally defines tipping points as discontinuities between current and future states of a system and introduces candidate measures of when a system tips based on changes in the probability distribution over future states. We make two categorical distinctions between types of tips...

We examine the geography of the Tea Party movement by drawing upon a unique data source that harvested thousands of events from the <italic>Meetup.org</italic> and Tea Party Patriots websites during the latter half of 2010. The spatial distribution of events strongly suggests that Tea Party activism was borne...

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of...

Elections are modeled as a public signal in an incomplete information game of revolution. By changing beliefs about the general level of anti-regime sentiment, elections can make citizens more or less apt to rebel and hence make a successful revolution more or less likely. This effect makes...

Previous research by Nickerson (2007a) testing 13 email get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns concludes that email from third parties is not an effective method of increasing voter turnout. We conducted three rounds of email GOTV experiments in San Mateo County, California, in cooperation with the...

In "Oil, Islam, and Women," Michael Ross (2008a) develops a gendered Dutch Disease theory, which points to oil wealth as a potential explanation for the slow progress towards gender equality in the Middle East. He then presents empirical analysis in support of this theory and concludes that...