39 U.S. states authorize recall elections, but the incentives they create are not well understood. We examine how changes in the perceived threat of recall alter the behavior of one set of officials: judges. In 2016, outrage over the sentence imposed on a Stanford athlete following his sexual...

We examine the intuition that in supermajoritarian settings, polarization and policy-making gridlock are fundamentally linked, but that a pressing common problem can reduce both. When actors' individual costs from a policy addressing such a problem differ, their preferences over the appropriate...

To what extent does the federal structure of policymaking in the United States mitigate or exacerbate national political conflict? We develop a model of two-level governance in a federal system in the presence of interstate preference heterogeneity and cross-state externalities. The key...

We develop a model that calls into question whether some key sources of incumbency advantage frequently cited in the empirical and theoretical literature are, in fact, beneficial to incumbents. Our results show that increases in ostensible benefits of incumbency associated with these sources...

I exploit a 2007 scandal concerning the General Services Administration (GSA) to examine whether executives can alter the bureaucratic allocation of government expenditures for electoral purposes. The GSA contracts with private vendors to provide supplies to, and acquire and maintain buildings...

The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I develop a model of the interaction between...

What is the marginal effect of competitiveness on the power of electoral incentives? Addressing this question empirically is difficult because challenges to incumbents are endogenous to their behavior in office. To overcome this obstacle, we exploit a unique feature of Kansas courts: 14...