Policies, Politics, and Polities

This dissertation addresses applied causal effect estimation concerning three topics in public choice and political economics. Chapter One studies the effect of prison privatization and public official corruption on how often convicted criminals receive prison sentences over probation. This question is modeled through a four-stage, three-agent, incomplete information game with a lobbying-susceptible judicial authority. Using 600,000 federal trials and an instrumental variables control function, results suggest that, with high corruption levels, an additional private prison increases incarceration likelihood by 0.4%. This effect varies by crime type and demographic subgroup; groups with lower initial levels of incarceration see larger increases.Chapter Two asks how increases in insurance coverage following the Affordable Care Act altered voting behavior to assess public reception of the act. A theoretic framework for insurance coverage decision-making before and after the policy shows the interaction of health beliefs and wealth levels determine welfare changes. The framework is tested using spatially-disaggregated insurance coverage rates before and after the policy and national precinct-level presidential election results. Overall effects and propensity score-matched sets of geographies across Medicaid expansion discontinuities are considered. Voting impacts from Medicaid coverage increases depended on income levels, with poorer areas of coverage gain swinging toward Clinton and richer areas toward Trump. Net effects were comparable in size to effects from local unemployment rate changes.Chapter Three identifies how individuals value political similarity in church attendance by using 270,000 geocoded church addresses, precinct election results, and anonymized smartphone location data. First, instrumenting for home-church distances with work-church distances, the average churchgoer spends $20-60 per year in fuel costs to reduce partisan disagreement. Second, a panel of daily church attendance in the months before and after the 2016 presidential election demonstrates attendance rate decline among the politically-mismatched, suggesting an additional$7-17 in yearly fuel expenditure and $160-265 in church donations would be paid if political differences were removed. Third, those with higher initial political disagreement levels were more likely to change churches. The combined valuation represents 16-42% of average yearly Christian church donations

Spatial scale and the geographical polarization of the American electorate

© 2018 In the large literature on the growing polarization of the American electorate and its representatives relatively little attention is paid to the spatial polarization of voters for the two parties at presidential elections. Bishop argued this has increased as the result of residential location decisions: Democratic Party supporters have increasingly moved to neighborhoods where others of that persuasion are already congregated, for example. His analyses at the county scale are geographically incommensurate with that argument, however; the lacuna is filled using precinct-level data for the entire United States for the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Multi-level modelling shows polarization at those elections was significantly greater at the precinct than the county, state and division scales. Change over the three elections at the precinct scale was probably associated with redistricting and reduced support from the Democratic Party by some groups.status: publishe

Political Storms: Emergent Partisan Skepticism of Hurricane Risks

Mistrust of scientific evidence and government-issued guidelines is increasingly correlated with political affiliation. Survey evidence has documented skepticism in a diverse set of issues including climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and, most recently, COVID-19 risks. Less well understood is whether these beliefs alter high-stakes behavior. Combining GPS data for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with 2016 U.S. presidential election precinct-level results, we examine how conservative-media dismissals of hurricane advisories in 2017 influenced evacuation decisions. Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes. Results are robust to fine-grain geographic controls, which compare likely Clinton and Trump voters living within 150 m of each other. The rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts—and the resulting divide in self-protective measures—illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism

Political storms: Emergent partisan skepticism of hurricane risks.

Mistrust of scientific evidence and government-issued guidelines is increasingly correlated with political affiliation. Survey evidence has documented skepticism in a diverse set of issues including climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and, most recently, COVID-19 risks. Less well understood is whether these beliefs alter high-stakes behavior. Combining GPS data for 2.7 million smartphone users in Florida and Texas with 2016 U.S. presidential election precinct-level results, we examine how conservative-media dismissals of hurricane advisories in 2017 influenced evacuation decisions. Likely Trump-voting Florida residents were 10 to 11 percentage points less likely to evacuate Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters (34% versus 45%), a gap not present in prior hurricanes. Results are robust to fine-grain geographic controls, which compare likely Clinton and Trump voters living within 150 m of each other. The rapid surge in media-led suspicion of hurricane forecasts-and the resulting divide in self-protective measures-illustrates a large behavioral consequence of science denialism