Who drives social change - the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female...

Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding...

A substantial literature studies franchise extension, focusing primarily on class-based - rather than race-based - voting restrictions. This paper constructs and analyzes a novel dataset that codes the presence of race-based restrictions on voting in 131 jurisdictions over 1730-2000 (consisting...