Working Papers

How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress (with Danny Ebanks and Gary King)

An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well known massive changes over time in indirect measures — such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split-ticket voting, and others — all seem to imply wide swings in electoral accountability. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a century. We resolve this paradox with a generative statistical model of the full vote distribution to avoid biases induced by the common practice of studying only central tendencies, and validate it with extensive out-of-sample tests. We show that different states of the partisan battlefield lead in interestingly different ways to the same high probability of incumbent defeat. Many challenges to American democracy remain, but this core feature remains durable.

If a Statistical Model Predicts That Common Events Should Occur Only Once in 10,000 Elections, Maybe it's the Wrong Model (with Danny Ebanks and Gary King)

Political scientists forecast elections, not primarily to satisfy public interest, but to validate statistical models used for estimating many quantities of scholarly interest. Although scholars have learned a great deal from these models, they can be embarrassingly overconfident: Events that should occur once in 10,000 elections occur almost every year, and even those that should occur once in a trillion-trillion elections are sometimes observed. We develop a novel generative statistical model of US congressional elections and validate it with extensive out-of-sample tests. The generatively accurate descriptive summaries provided by this model demonstrate that the 1950s was as partisan and differentiated as the current period, but with parties not based on ideological differences as they are today. The model also shows that even though the size of the incumbency advantage has varied tremendously over time, the risk of an in-party incumbent losing a midterm election contest has been high and essentially constant over at least the last two thirds of a century.

The Post-Earnings Announcement Drift: An Anomalous Anomaly (with Mathew D. McCubbins and Jeff L. McMullin)

Prior literature uses portfolio analysis to document anomalies of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). We argue portfolio analysis introduces an aggregation bias and clouds inferences about firm-level stock price behavior. We demonstrate this point in the context of the Post-Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD), a well-known anomaly of the EMH. After replicating the PEAD portfolio analysis, we disaggregate the PEAD portfolios and find anomalies within the PEAD anomaly. Results of our analysis raise concerns over whether the PEAD exists at disaggregated levels, firms' prices actually drift in the direction of earnings news, and whether the PEAD is an anomaly of the EMH or just an artifact of aggregation.

Auctioning off the Agenda: Bargaining in Legislatures with Endogenous Scheduling Control (with Jernej Copic)

Caltech Social Science Working Paper #1266. There are many examples of allocation problems where the final allocation affects more than one agent, but the models developed to study them typically allow for side payments between agents. However, there are political economy applications where it is hard to imagine monetary transfers between the agents, at least not legal ones. In this paper we propose a general political economic framework for the study of allocation problems with externalities without side payments. We consider a setup with complete information and we formulate the problem as one where the status quo describes an initial allocation that can altered in a sequence of proposals. The number of these proposals is restricted. In the context of our main application, bidding for slots on a legislative agenda, such restriction can be interpreted as scarcity of plenary time for considering the possible bills to move the policy. The intuition for our model comes out of framing the problem as a special type of a multi-good auction. We show that equilibria generically exist within the general model.

Scheduling Auctions and Proto-Parties in Legislatures (with Jernej Copic)

Caltech Social Science Working Paper #1387. We consider the impact of the scarcity of plenary time in legislatures both on the outcome of the legislative bargaining process and the organization of the legislature itself. We do so by developing a novel model that we call scheduling auctions. In the model, the legislature is charged with allocating a fixed budget. Members can propose an allocation and the scheduling agent decides which one of the possible proposals will be considered by the entire legislature in plenary session for an up or down vote. We show in this simple setting that deciding which member should be selected as the scheduling agent endogenously induces the creation of nascent political parties that we call proto-parties. We also show that these legislative structures have positive welfare implications.

The Effect of Voter Identification Laws on Turnout (with R. Michael Alvarez and Delia Bailey)

Caltech Social Science Working Paper #1267R. Since the passage of the "Help America Vote Act" in 2002, nearly half of the states have adopted a variety of new identification requirements for voter registration and participation by the 2006 general election. There has been little analysis of whether these requirements reduce voter participation, especially among certain classes of voters. In this paper we document the effect of voter identification requirements on registered voters as they were imposed in states in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and in the 2002 and 2006 midterm elections. Looking first at trends in the aggregate data, we find no evidence that voter identification requirements reduce participation. Using individual-level data from the Current Population Survey across these elections, however, we find that the strictest forms of voter identification requirements — combination requirements of presenting an identification card and positively matching one's signature with a signature either on file or on the identification card, as well as requirements to show picture identification — have a negative impact on the participation of registered voters relative to the weakest requirement, stating one's name. We also find evidence that the stricter voter identification requirements depress turnout to a greater extent for less educated and lower income populations, but no racial differences.

Work in Progress and Conference Papers

The Saturation Dangers in Multi-Decade Democracy Studies (with Ransi Clark). Presented at the 2025 Midwest Political Science Association meeting; scheduled for presentation at the 2026 Summer Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology.

Autocratic Doppelgängers: Some Methodological Issues in Estimating the Effect of Democracy (with Ransi Clark).

Estimating Models of Elections for Small Legislatures: An Analysis of Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. Senate (with Seo-young Silvia Kim).

Measuring Democracy and the Rule of Law via Statistical Learning (with Mathew D. McCubbins and Joshua Lerner).

Estimating the Effect of Corporate Governance (with Mathew D. McCubbins and Jeff L. McMullin).