Academic Publications
“Community interventions in the administration of justice,” with Carlo Horz. American Journal of Political Science. 2024. Available online.
”Guilt and Guilty Pleas,” with Andrew Little. American Political Science Review. 2024. Available on Firstview.
“Access to Justice in Revenue-Seeking Legal Institutions.” 2023. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 35(2): 75--99.
- (co)winner, Elinor Ostrom Prize for the “Best Article Published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics 2022-23.”
“Political Interventions in the Administration of Justice,” with Carlo Horz. 2023. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 18(1):5-38.
“Justice for Sale: Political Crises and Legal Development.” 2021. Political Science Research and Methods, 7(4): 779-799.
“Causes, Theories, and the Past in Political Science,” with Sanford Gordon. 2020. Public Choice, 185(3): 315-333.
“The Birth of Pork: Local appropriations in America’s first century,” with Sanford Gordon. 2018. American Political Science Review. 112(3): 564-579.
“Veto Players, Policy Change, and Institutional Design," with Tiberiu Dragu. 2017. Research and Politics. 4(3): 1-6.
“Cognitive Responses by U.S. Presidents to Foreign Policy Crises,” with B. Gregory Marfleet, in Rethinking Foreign Policy Analysis: States, Leaders, and the Micro-foundations of Behavioral International Relations. Stephen G. Walker, Akan Malici, and Mark Schafer, Eds. London: Routledge, 2010.
Working Papers
“Do Felon Voting Rules Affect Criminal Prosecution?” with Sidak Yntiso. Appendix. Currently R&R.
“The Political Origins of Unequal Protection: Women and the State in Medieval England.”
“Who do states protect? The political economy of market exchange and justice provision,” with Catherine Hafer.
What determines a state’s ability to protect citizens’ rights and foster economic growth? We show that, even if all citizens have equal access to resources, a state can only fully protect its citizens if it can independently, immediately, and perfectly detect and remedy rights violations. Otherwise, its ability to protect citizens varies crucially with economic characteristics of the citizens themselves. Moreover, some citizens—particularly unskilled individuals, or skilled production generalists in possession of significant production economies of scale— may engage in predatory litigation.
“Learning and Incompetence in Government,” with Carlo Horz.
Why do political leaders delegate to incompetent subordinates? The existing literature has focused on the trade-off between loyalty and competence, emphasizing that leaders who value the former may have to accept less of the latter. By contrast, we argue that ideologically committed leaders may delegate to incompetent subordinates for informational reasons. In a context in which the successful implementation of policy depends at least partially on competence, we offer two formal models representing two different informational rationales for delegation to incompetents, one focused on leader learning and the other on citizen learning.
First, we argue that ideologically committed leaders may want subordinates to share their ideological preferences, but may not know for sure whether this is the case. Delegation to subordinates allows leaders to learn about subordinates' ideology, because it tempts ideologically unaligned subordinates to move policy away from leader preferences. But leaders pay a cost if an unaligned subordinate successfully implements an unaligned policy. Leaders with these concerns prefer to delegate to moderately incompetent subordinates, allowing them to learn some subordinates' ideological preferences without too much risk of incongruent policy implementation.
Next, we argue that political leaders may also want to control citizen learning. More specifically, political leaders sometimes publicly commit themselves to ideological positions which demand policies that are highly unlikely to be successful if implemented (perhaps because they are ‘extreme’ and therefore very unlikely to match the actual state of the world). To the extent that leaders depend for reelection on citizens believing that their ideological commitments are implementable and appropriate, leaders committed to an extreme ideology do not want citizens to learn that the ideology is infeasible. If successful implementation depends both on whether or not a chosen policy matches the state of the world and on the competence of the implementer, such leaders may appoint incompetent subordinates to implement policies in order to prevent the population from learning with certainty that the leader’s ideological views are not feasible.
Work in Progress
“Fiscal Prosecution,” with Sidak Yntiso.
The funding of local criminal justice offices by the state often depends on rates of crime in the area. Because rates of crime are measured through arrests and convictions, they are endogenously determined by local criminal justice actors. Using data on funding allocations and convictions in Virginia, we show that local conviction counts show significant bunching around funding cutoffs, suggesting that local actors may be manipulating prosecution in order to maximize office funding.
“Judicial Competence and Extreme Decisions.”