Essays on the political economy of elections
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation studies how elections influence policymaking, with a focus on local law enforcement. I collect new data on elections which I combine with large, untapped administrative datasets on government behavior. I then use modern empirical techniques for causal inference to study how elections shape the policies governments choose. This dissertation includes three papers applying this approach. In the first paper, I use close elections between Democratic and Republican sheriff candidates to study the polarization of local immigration enforcement. I find that, despite claims of highly polarized policing, Democratic and Republican sheriffs pursue similar immigration policies on average. The second paper studies whether elections make police more responsive to the public. Using the introduction of elected police commissioners in the UK, I find that electing police oversight led left-leaning districts to relax drug policing relative to right-leaning districts. In the third paper, co-authored with Andy Hall, we use close elections between moderate and extreme US House candidates to study why moderates perform better in general elections. We find that moderates perform better because extreme candidates motivate the opposing party to turn out at higher rates while not increasing turnout in their own party. Put together, these articles find that elections are important for determining policy, but do not always work in conventionally partisan ways--in all three papers, parties contain members with a variety of positions, and these positions matter
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Thompson, Daniel McKinley |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hall, Andrew B |
| Thesis advisor | Hall, Andrew B |
| Thesis advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Hainmueller, Jens |
| Degree committee member | Grimmer, Justin |
| Degree committee member | Hainmueller, Jens |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daniel M. Thompson |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Daniel McKinley Thompson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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