Research

Policy with concentrated costs often faces intense localized opposition. Both private and governmental actors frequently use financial compensation to attempt to overcome this opposition. We measure how effective such compensation is for winning policy support in the arena of housing development. We build a novel survey platform that shows respondents images of their self-reported neighborhood with hypothetical renderings of new housing superimposed on existing structures. Using a sample of nearly 600 Bostonians, we find that compensating residents increases their support for nearby market-rate housing construction. However, compensation does not influence support for affordable housing. We theorize that the inclusion of affordable housing activates symbolic attitudes, decreasing the importance of financial self-interest and thus the effectiveness of compensation. Our findings suggest greater interaction between self-interest and symbolic politics within policy design than previously asserted. Together, this research signals opportunities for coalition building by policy entrepreneurs when facing opposition due to concentrated costs.

Local governments control a hidden flow of economic goods that never appear on city budgets. Through the housing entitlement process, city officials may condition approval on the benefits developers provide to organized interests. But the politics and policies created by this discretionary review have yet to be studied through the lens of interest group mobilization. We bridge this gap with an analysis of the behavior of construction unions in the housing entitlement process. Using data from 164 U.S. cities, we find that construction union representatives are more likely to attend public meetings to advocate for favorable labor agreements when the expected profitability of new housing developments is high — and thus, when there are more particularistic benefits on the table. While interest group competition within local participatory institutions may signal a robust, pluralist democracy, it also risks driving up housing costs, to the detriment of both organized and unorganized residents.

How do the identities of potential policy beneficiaries sway public support for these policies in a public health setting? Using a factorial randomized vignette experiment fielded on a high-quality nationally-representative survey sample, we show that the racial identity of substance users depicted in a news story shapes public opinion on policies to address the opioid overdose crisis. People display biases in favor of members of their own racial identity group that manifest in their support of treatment-based policies. However, racial identity-based biases are less uniform in attitudes towards punitive policies to address the opioid crisis. We show that these biases are unlikely to be explained by the common theoretic mechanism of differential perceived blame. Similar ingroup preferences are not observed for gender or residential context. These results highlight the continued centrality of race in the formation of public policy preferences.

Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time while Google-generated geocodes are almost always more accurate. However, while Google's geolocation is more likely to be accurate, when it is inaccurate, it deviates from the true location by a much greater distance than HUD. We therefore recommend that scholars use Google-generated geocodes for most research applications where the localized environment matters; however, in studies where observations are aggregated to a larger area, researchers may prefer to use HUD geocodes, which are more frequently inaccurate but typically by smaller distances.

While the institutions that structure spatial representation vary widely across U.S. municipalities, the distributive consequences of local electoral rules have not been adequately studied through a spatial lens. We leverage the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which compelled over one hundred cities to switch from at-large to district elections for city council, to causally identify how equalizing spatial representation changes the permitting of new housing. District elections decrease the supply of new multifamily housing, particularly in segregated cities with sizable and systematically underrepresented minority groups. But we also find evidence that district elections end the disproportionate channeling of new housing into minority neighborhoods. Our findings highlight a trade-off: at-large representation may facilitate the production of goods with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, but it does so by forcing less politically powerful constituencies to bear the brunt of those costs.

When does self-interest influence public opinion on contentious public policies? The bulk of theory in political science suggests that self-interest is only a minor force in public opinion. Using nationally-representative survey data, we show how financial and spatial self-interest and partisanship all shape public opinion on opioid treatment policy. We find that a majority of respondents support a redistributive funding model for treatment programs, while treatment funded by taxation based on a community's overdose rate is less popular. Moreover, financial self-interest cross-pressures lower-income Republicans, closing the partisan gap in support by more than half. We also experimentally test how the spatial burden of siting treatment clinics alters policy preferences. People across the political spectrum are less supportive when construction of a clinic is proposed closer to their home. These results highlight how partisanship and self-interest interact in shaping preferences on public policy with concentrated burdens.

How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but ``Not In My Back Yard'' (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build in once affordable cities? I use two original surveys to measure how support for new housing varies between the city-scale and neighborhood-scale. Together, an exit poll of 1,660 voters during the 2015 San Francisco election and a national survey of over 3,000 respondents provide the first empirical measurements of NIMBYism at the individual-level. While homeowners are sensitive to housing's proximity, renters typically do not express NIMBYism. However, in high-rent cities, renters demonstrate NIMBYism on par with homeowners, despite continuing to support large increases in the housing supply citywide. These scale-dependent preferences not only help explain the deepening affordability crisis, but show how institutions can undersupply even widely supported public goods. When preferences are scale-dependent, the scale of decision making matters.

Recent studies find that high levels of black-white segregation increased rates of foreclosures and subprime lending across US metropolitan areas during the housing crisis. These studies speculate that segregation created distinct geographic markets that enabled subprime lenders and brokers to leverage the spatial proximity of minorities to disproportionately target minority neighborhoods. Yet, the studies do not explicitly test whether the concentration of subprime loans in minority neighborhoods varied by segregation levels. We address this shortcoming by integrating neighborhood-level data and spatial measures of segregation to examine the relationship between segregation and subprime lending across the 100 largest US metropolitan areas.

While scholars have documented feedback effects among a policy's direct winners and losers, less is known about whether such effects can occur among the indirectly affected — ''the policy adjacent.'' Using 458 geocoded housing developments built between two nearly identical statewide ballot propositions funding affordable housing in California, we show that policy generates feedback effects among neighboring residents in systematic ways. New, nearby affordable housing causes majority-homeowner blocks to increase their support for the housing bond, while majority-renter blocks decrease or do not change their support. We attribute the positive effect among majority-homeowner blocks to the housing's replacement of blight. In contrast, the lack of a positive effect among majority-renter blocks may be driven by the threat of gentrification. Policy implementation can win support for expansion among unexpected beneficiaries, while failing to do so even among the policy's presumed allies.

As Western democracies diversify, racial threat risks activating exclusionary attitudes among members of the majority. While research has focused on support for immigration restrictions, local housing policy is the primary means of maintaining racial segregation in the US. Using referendum vote share from over 3,700 precincts in Los Angeles County, I show that an increase in the local non-white population leads to greater behavioral support for direct democratic control over affordable housing. I argue that this ''voters' veto'' is valued for excluding low-income, predominantly non-white residents from one's community. This effect exists in both majority white and non-white precincts, demonstrating that exclusionary reactions are not limited to racial threat among the majority. Instead, a shrinking white population may signal broadly shared concerns about neighborhood trajectory. Given local conditions can shape political beliefs, these findings provide a mechanism for the shift of white and non-white voters towards exclusionary political movements.

District elections have long been considered a tool for promoting minority representation in local government. But surprisingly little is understood about how electoral maps themselves shape political outcomes. We collect over one hundred new districting plans from cities across California that converted from at-large to district elections in the wake of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. Applying a state-of-the-art automated redistricting simulator, we find that most of these cities could not feasibly produce a plan with even one Latino-majority seat, though those that could generally tried to maximize this quantity. We introduce alternative metrics of descriptive representation that are tailored to a city's political dynamics and risk tolerance around securing at least one Latino seat. Contrary to intuitions from partisan districting, we see no conflict between the goals of guaranteeing minimal representation and maximizing seats overall; rather, we find that concentrating Latino voters within districts often achieves both goals and at no expense for Latinos' substantive representation.

Reducing emissions to combat climate change requires the rapid deployment of renewable energy. In many countries, the power to site these are in the hands of local governments. Yet, we know little about how this political decentralization shapes the siting of renewable energy developments. Building on the premise that local politicians are responsive to the preferences of their own electorate, this article develops and test a new theoretical model of how local governments site energy developments. The key outcome of the model is a prediction about where voters will approve of new wind turbine construction. The model predictions are evaluated on a new and granular dataset on the siting of all wind turbines in Denmark from 2009 to 2022. The analysis provides strong support for the theoretical model. Building on these findings, we argue that political decentralization on this issue may hurt both efficiency and the perceived democratic legitimacy of the transition to a zero carbon economy, as local officials have no incentive to optimize energy efficiency and disregard potential nuisances for those in adjoining municipalities.

Majority-minority congressional districts have been shown to close the racial turnout gap. However, a majority-minority district also changes the candidate pool, potentially affecting the candidate quality and mobilization of minority voters. Using data on newly drawn districts at the municipal level, we find that majority Latino districts decrease turnout among Latino voters. However, this decline in Latino turnout does not occur when there is at least one experienced Latino candidate on the ballot. We theorize that experienced Latino candidates are necessary for mobilizing Latino voters. Using local campaign finance data, we find that spending among Latino candidates is twice as high in races where at least one of the candidates has previously won a local election. We also show that this absence of experienced Latino candidates is common after the introduction of districting at the local level. We identify other situations where a reform meant to improve minority representation leads to a constricted pipeline of experienced candidates, depressing minority turnout. We label these conditions "experience vacuums."

From design to approval to construction, the development process provides countless junctures of ethical risk, particularly in mitigating aproject’s negative externalities. These externalities, ranging from congestion to gentrification, have been a constant source of friction between developers and neighboring residents. Indeed, the management of such externalities has required government intervention in the form of zoning and permit approval. Like any political process, permit approval consists of negotiating, bargaining, and promise making, actions inherently based on an ethics of trust and transparency. Recently, bargaining innovations have sought to lessen the role of government as a mediator between developers and community groups, potentially increasing the risk of violations of trust and transparency. In this article, I analyze these bargaining innovations to understand how investors, community advocates, and concerned citizens can better navigate the ethical risks of the development process.