We have a New Working Paper on the political economy of politicians’ neighborhoods! We show that politicians live in richer neighborhoods and protect them from undesirable buildings and the removal of public goods. A thread 1/11, and the Paper: https://t.co/lPdBM6NmSm

@chrislhayes The guy who plays Spider in School of Rock is currently the elected District Attorney of Tyler County, Texas

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.@beckerdavidj praises the election workers and volunteers who put in long hours to count ballots: "We won't know all of their names. It's too bad, because they are heroes of democracy." https://t.co/JKLQXRyvdE

Paper is https://t.co/UG9gF8sHcO. Election aggregates and even polls are ambiguous wrt actual rate of ticket splitting. For anyone planning to work w/ election administrators to study this data in other states, I'd love to get in touch.

Taken together, the findings show large wealth gaps between elected officials and those they represent at all levels of elected office + many features of elections may contribute to the gap. This is a draft version, so all feedback welcome!

Finally, I show switching from at-large to district elections, a reform many localities in CA adopted in staggered fashion due to CA Voting Rights Act, seemed to decrease the wealth gap, at least for school board races, possibly bc the reform reduces costs of campaigning.

Candidate wealth no longer correlates with winning elections after adjusting for campaign fundraising. Purely descriptive, but suggests local campaign finance reform that equalizes candidate fundraising may be an important policy lever

I show that the wealthy are over-represented in local offices in part because elections favor them over lower-wealth candidates. Candidate pool is wealthier than the public, and those who win are even wealthier than those who run but lose.

Because wealth gaps appear early in the candidate pipeline to higher office, policies designed to increase economic representativeness may need to start at the local level. Next, I explore reasons for the wealth gap and possible reforms.

Constraints on supply of qualified, lower-wealth candidates can’t explain the full wealth gap: it remains large when comparing those w/ similar backgrounds, like candidates for judgeships to similarly aged lawyers from the same law school.

I find that candidates for nearly all local offices live in higher-value homes than their constituents, meaning that wealth disparities appear even at the earliest stages of the candidate pipeline to higher office.

How much wealthier are local elected officials in the US than those they represent, and why? In a new paper, I link candidates in CA to their home values to estimate wealth gaps between candidates and constituents. ( https://t.co/tErXwO6yHV)

Congrats to @MichaelLMorse for PhD defense today -- Full of voter file, ballot image, and court records data, an engrossing three-party story of the Florida Amendment 4 bipartisan electoral coalition and the depths of fees and fines, disenfranchisement https://t.co/APbC8oCUjV

I haven’t been tweeting much lately, but I have to thank the firefighters at @SFFDPIO. I woke up to this massive fire half a block away from my apartment—I could feel the heat from my window. Thankfully the firefighters kept it from spreading to the houses on my block.

@mattyglesias Things may have changed recently, but R and D sheriffs cooperated with ICE at similar rates--another highly salient, nationally contested enforcement choice https://t.co/p5W63zZiGN

This analysis is really frustrating, and not something I would signed off on at @FiveThirtyEight. Let me try and go through some of the reasons why. https://t.co/r30Wss7SJd

Let's stop with the BS... Voting by mail in large numbers (via absentee or all vote by mail) won't make a partisan difference. What it will do is help turnout stay up and keep folks safe. This seems like a win for everyone.

I know things can escalate really quickly, but I didn't have a good sense of what to expect over the next week. So, I used country-level data on confirmed #COVID19 cases to generate a 7-day projection based on a simple time-series model: https://t.co/q8qoYowJDI

New article in the APSR evaluates prevalence of possible voting fraud. Based on a huge battery of evidence, it finds "Double voting is not currently carried out in such a systematic way that it presents a threat to the integrity of American elections."

I'm very pleased to announce a new journal that will be rolling out in 2020: the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. Or JPIPE. It will be published by @now_publishers, who also publish the @qjps_editors.