Working Papers
Vanderbilt Law Review, Forthcoming
Individuals with prior felony convictions often must complete all terms of their sentence before they regain voter eligibility. Many jurisdictions include legal-financial obligations (LFOs) — fines, fees, and/or restitution stemming from convictions — in the terms of the sentence. Twenty-eight states, governing over 182 million Americans, either directly or indirectly tie LFO repayment to voting privileges, a practice we call felony financial disenfranchisement.
Proponents of felony financial disenfranchisement posit that returning citizens must satisfy the financial obligations stemming from convictions to restore themselves as community equals. Moralism aside, others claim low rates of electoral participation among those with felony convictions imply such disenfranchisement is inconsequential.
In this Article, we challenge both of these claims. To do so, we draw upon new empirical and contextual evidence from Florida, which disenfranchises more returning citizens than any other state. We rely on data and natural experiments from a non-partisan, non-profit advocacy group that we launched called Free Our Vote.
The Article illustrates how felony financial disenfranchisement creates uncertainty around voter eligibility, which likely deters many otherwise qualified voters with felony records from participating. We also measure, for the first time, the direct impact of felony financial disenfranchisement on voter participation, using a debt relief program implemented by Free Our Vote. Specifically, we compare electoral participation between registered voters whose LFOs were eliminated by Free Our Vote against virtually identical debtors who did not benefit from our program. We find our debt relief program increased voter turnout by approximately 26% among this group during the 2020 election.
The contextual and empirical evidence we present unequivocally demonstrates that narratives in favor of felony financial disenfranchisement are misguided. Failure to pay criminal court debt typically arises from bureaucratic complications and opacity as well as indigency. Ethics-oriented arguments thus grossly misconstrue the challenges returning citizens face. Likewise, the purported benefits of induced criminal court revenue from LFOs are overstated. Given the countervailing costs tied to criminal debt, and its disparate impact on indigent and Black defendants, we conclude that felony financial disenfranchisement is on balance a socially harmful policy that should be eliminated.
Revise and Resubmit, AEJ: Economic Policy
We study how distance to one’s polling place affects the likelihood of voting, either
in-person or by mail. We use a border discontinuity design, with data from over 15
million voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The average effect of distance to the
polling place on turnout is small, in part because voters substitute to mail-in voting.
A one mile increase in distance to polling place decreases the likelihood of voting in a
general election by up to 0.99 percentage points. The effect is larger in areas with a
heavy reliance on public transportation and in low income areas. Using these estimates,
we identify the turnout-maximizing locations of polling places and compute gains to
turnout.
Presentations:
American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Sep 2019
The literature on the Supreme Court has used static models of voting to estimate the policy preferences of justices that largely ignore the role of precedent, a dynamic component in justices' decision-making process that could help explain part of their voting behavior. I formulate and structurally estimate a dynamic game-theoretic model of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court that can infer the preferences of individual justices over ideology versus the weight they place on respecting precedent. I find that justices who experience a high cost of deviating from precedent are more ideological when their votes are likely to be pivotal. Taking the model to data, I find that precedent plays a sizable role in explaining justices' voting behaviors with significant heterogeneity across justices and legal issues. Moreover, incorporating precedent in the analysis changes the ideology estimates for about one-third of the justices in the sample. I use these estimates to simulate counterfactual outcomes for policy proposals, such as court-packing and judicial term limits.
Presentations:
NHH Norwegian School of Economics Seminar, Feb 2021
Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, Nov 2020
Work In Progress
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Bandwagon Effects in Caucuses (with Juan Margitic and Ben Solow)
In multi-candidate elections, past electoral outcomes may serve as a coordination device for strategic voters and as a bandwagon for behavioral voters who have a preference for voting for the winner. Both motivations working in tandem can amplify the effect of close wins on future electoral outcomes (Pons and Tricauld 2020). We use the novel setting provided by the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses to test this hypothesis using a regression discontinuity design. We find that candidates who barely ranked first in the first round get a higher vote share (5.6 p.p.) in the second round and are more likely to win (12.5 p.p.), compared to those who barely ranked second. We find a similar increase (7.3 p.p.) in the vote share for candidates who barely ranked second in the first round compared to those who barely ranked third. The unique electoral rules that govern caucuses allow us to rule out alternative channels such as a change in the composition of the electorate, endogenous responses by candidates, and media coverage of winners. The results suggest that both coordination and behavioral motivations could play a significant role in determining electoral outcomes even in the context of high-stakes elections.