A novel database of 611,239 legislator requests to a near-census of U.S. federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies (2007–2020) is used to measure how changes in institutional power shape legislators’ behavior toward policy work and constituency service.
A historical puzzle: how core principles of modern democracy influenced the evolution of government budgets. Building on Dahl’s (1971) concept of polyarchy, the study links stages of electoral contestation and suffrage inclusion to distinct patterns of state spending.
This paper asks how patron–client ties among officials affect information flows inside bureaucratic hierarchies. The authors argue that lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders undertake informal information campaigns—sending signals of diligence and defending themselves—to compete for favors. Drawing on newly assembled Chinese sources, including a corpus of internal emails between city patrons and county clients and original data on county governments’ public replies to citizen complaints, the study compares communication patterns between client and non-client counties. The contribution is a descriptive account showing greater upward communication from client counties without detectable differences in public-facing complaint responses.
This paper asks whether expanding pension benefits increases political participation among retirees, testing policy feedback and habit-formation theories with a causal design. The authors leverage a large pension reform in Illinois that raised benefits and use a regression discontinuity approach on administrative records to estimate turnout effects among retired public employees across multiple elections.
This paper asks how U.S. military procurement during World War II affected state-level macroeconomic outcomes, using newly digitized contract records for 1940–1945 to estimate short-run multipliers and employment impacts. The study provides state-by-state evidence on personal income responses to wartime spending and reports estimates of multiplier magnitudes, implied costs per job-year, and a pattern the author calls negative scale effects.
This paper asks whether a teacher’s measured value added (VA) depends on the VA of the teacher in the previous grade and how that dynamic affects decisions that rely on VA. Using administrative records for North Carolina classrooms, the authors estimate how last grade’s mean teacher VA relates to a teacher’s own VA and evaluate how standard VA approaches would perform under a dismissal policy that targets the bottom 5% of teachers.
Equal turnout supports equal representation, but mandatory voting may shift who shows up.
Many elderly people in the Global South lack official proof of age and identity and thus long reside in the blind spot of states—especially those who are poor, indigenous, live in rural areas, or worked outside the formal sector. This study asks how states can "go the last mile" to incorporate these marginalized elders and what prompts them to register births decades after the fact.
How do we know the extent of racial bias in policing? New research suggests administrative records often mask it. Police officers, when choosing whom to investigate, may show racial discrimination that isn't captured by standard data analysis methods. This gap means past estimates could be seriously off.
This study asks whether starting to cohabit with a partner changes individual voter turnout and uses a large administrative dataset to compare turnout before and after couples move in together. The authors' central contribution is an empirical comparison that leverages timing: households that begin cohabiting just before an election are compared to those that begin just after, allowing assessment of turnout changes associated with taking up shared residence.
Voter fraud beliefs shape views on electoral integrity versus accessibility. This study estimates the actual prevalence of double voting in 2012 U.S. presidential elections.
Redistribution theories suggest incumbents target benefits to secure voter support. However, this article shows that durable benefits—which permanently boost incomes—might reduce dependence on incumbents. This paradox creates a new rationale for strategic allocation: balancing the income effect with standard electoral rewards.
Recent scholarship finds eligible voters who live in neighborhoods with many arrested or incarcerated people vote at lower rates than similar voters in less-affected neighborhoods. This study asks whether a high-profile policy change — Amendment Four, the 2018 Florida ballot initiative that promised to re-enfranchise most people with felony convictions — narrowed that turnout gap.
This paper shows that the degree of indirect colonial rule in Africa depended on an interaction between empire-level characteristics and precolonial institutions. British administrations tended to govern more indirectly, while French administrations followed a centralized administrative blueprint—shaped by republican ideology and greater administrative resources—that more often displaced local hereditary authority.
A fresh comparison of employer and worker wage records reveals widespread underreporting by formal firms, with better compliance among larger employers.
Surveys are a primary source for studying voter turnout, but they tend to overestimate turnout because of two distinct problems: nonresponse bias (people who do not take surveys differ in voting behavior) and overreporting (respondents claiming they voted when they did not). This study disentangles those two sources of error using linked survey and administrative records for Danish elections.
This paper explores how unexpected economic downturns at the local level influenced voter behavior during Hungary's national elections.
Why do some ambitious, nonincremental reforms fail to change entrenched practices? This article develops a theory of discretionary implementation and applies it to Colombia’s ethnic land restitution program (2012–18). Using process tracing of novel datasets on administrative cases and judicial rulings plus in-depth interviews, the authors explain how routine administrative choices—specifically layering and conversion—can slow and narrow extraordinary reform in practice, producing outcomes that fall short of legislative intent.