The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new dataset of nearly 55,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities...

Using new data on roll-call voting of U.S. state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. So-called "moderate'' districts that switch hands between parties are often internally...

Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of...

The relationship between votes and seats in the legislature lies at the heart of democratic governance. However, there has been little previous work on the downstream effects of partisan gerrymandering on the health of political parties. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the effect of Fox News Channel (FNC) on elections in the United States. FNC is the highest-rated channel on cable television and has a documented conservative slant. We show that FNC has helped Republican candidates in elections across levels of...

Housing policy is one of the most important areas of local politics. Yet little is known about how local legislatures and executives make housing policy decisions and how their elections shape policy in this important realm. We leverage survey data, housing policy data, and a new data source of...

In this paper, we examine polarization and partisan divergence in the American public on economic issues over the past 70 years. We bring to bear a new dataset that contains over half a million respondents from hundreds of individual polls. This dataset contains the responses to over 150...

The study of representation, electoral dynamics, and public opinion in Europe requires a scale of the public's latent ideology that is comparable across time and space. However, European public opinion polls rarely include enough questions in a given domain to apply scaling techniques such as...

How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity...

In 1994 China began a profound reform of its state-owned enterprises. We first describe and characterize this progress in two areas: privatization of small state-owned enterprises at the county level and mass layoffs of excess state workers at the city level. Local governments have initiated...