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Zachary Peskowitz |
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Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Emory University Curriculum Vitae Contact Information Department of Political Science 327 Tarbutton Hall 1555 Dickey Drive Atlanta, GA 30322 Email: zachary.f.peskowitz "at" emory "dot" edu |
| Publications |
Can features of surveys, such as question ordering and informational stimuli, affect respondent self-reported partisanship? We report the results of two studies to examine how the survey environment affects the probability that a respondent identifies with a particular party and presidential approval conditional on self-reported partisanship. In an original experiment, we find that, under some circumstances, a question ordering treatment increases Republican partisanship. The estimated effects are statistically different from zero in unweighted specifications where leaners are excluded from the definition of Republicans and also among respondents who identified as Republicans in previous survey waves. In our second study, we show that an informational intervention reduces the probability that a respondent identifies as an independent and that including post-treatment partisanship in a regression changes the estimated treatment effect of informational interventions on presidential approval. Our analysis shows that seemingly minor features of survey design can affect self-reported partisanship, average outcomes for different partisans, and treatment effect estimates. We discuss the implications of our findings for survey design and theories of partisan identification and presidential approval.
Electoral reforms affect legislative outcomes by influencing incumbent legislators' behavior, new entrants' behavior, and the probability that incumbents are replaced with new entrants. Empirical work on electoral reforms and polarization has focused on new entrants' behavior. We employ a simple decision theoretic framework with partial incumbent policy persistence and spatial voting to examine the three channels jointly. We show that a reform designed to encourage ideological moderation produces larger effects on polarization when the reform is implemented than when it is removed. The key insight is that implementing a moderation-inducing reform generates a set of challengers who are more likely to defeat incumbents while the incumbents are more likely to win reelection when the reform is removed. We then empirically examine how elections and legislative polarization respond to unlimited PAC contributions in state legislatures. Examining incumbents' decisions to stand for reelection, the electoral performance of incumbents who do run, and partisan polarization, we find empirical support for our predictions.
Political scientists have largely overlooked the democratic challenges inherent in the governance of U.S. public education - despite profound implications for educational delivery and, ultimately, social mobility and economic growth. In this study, we consider whether the interests of adult voters who elect school boards in each community are likely to be aligned with the educational needs of local students. Specifically, we compare voters and students in four states on several policy-relevant dimensions. Using official voter turnout records and rich microtargeting data, we document considerable demographic differences between voters who participate in school board elections and the students attending the schools that boards oversee. These gaps are most pronounced in majority non-white jurisdictions and school districts with the largest racial achievement gaps. Our novel analysis provides important context for understanding the political pressures facing school boards and their likely role in perpetuating educational and, ultimately, societal inequality.
We employ a regression discontinuity design leveraging close school board elections to investigate how the racial and ethnic composition of California school boards affects school district administration and student achievement. We find some evidence that increases in minority representation lead to cumulative achievement gains of approximately 0.1 standard deviations among minority students by the sixth post-election year. These gains do not come at the expense of white students' academic performance, which also appears to improve. Turning to the policy mechanisms that may explain these effects, we find that an increase in minority representation leads to greater capital funding and a larger proportion of district principals who are non-white. We find no significant effects of minority representation on school segregation, the reclassification of English language learners, or teacher staffing.
Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates' television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of candidates who advertise and allow candidates to craft messages to more narrow audiences than on television. Drawing on data from the newly released Facebook Ad Library API and television data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we find that a much broader set of candidates advertises on Facebook than television, particularly in down-ballot races. We then examine within-candidate variation in the strategic use and content of advertising on television relative to Facebook for all federal, statewide, and state legislative candidates in the 2018 election. Among candidates who use both advertising media, Facebook advertising occurs earlier in the campaign, is less negative, less issue focused, and more partisan than television advertising.
We use close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and student outcomes across seven states. Districts with passing levies directed new revenue toward support services and instructor salaries but did not increase teacher staffing levels. These districts eventually realized gains in student achievement and attainment. Our preferred estimates imply that increasing operational spending by $1000 per pupil increased test scores by approximately 0.15 of a standard deviation and graduation rates by approximately 9 percentage points. There is some evidence of diminishing returns, as these effects are driven by districts below the median in spending per pupil. Based on research linking academic outcomes to earnings, we conclude that these spending increases were likely cost-effective.
Governments around the world have privatized public services in the name of efficiency and citizen empowerment, but some argue that privatization could also affect citizen participation in democratic governance. We explore this possibility by estimating the impact of charter schools (which are publicly funded but privately operated) on school district elections. The analysis indicates that the enrollment of district students in charter schools reduced the number of votes cast in district school board contests and, correspondingly, reduced turnout in the odd-year elections in which those contests are held. This impact is concentrated in districts that serve low-achieving, impoverished, and minority students, leading to a modest decline in the share of voters in those districts who are black and who have children. There is little evidence that charter school expansion affected the outcomes of school board elections or turnout in other elections.
I develop a novel explanation for the incumbency advantage based on the ability of incumbents to signal ideologically distinct positions from their parties. Using voter-level data from the CCES and controlling for unobserved district heterogeneity, I find that voters in House elections primarily use information about the ideology of candidates' parties to infer the location of challengers while they instead rely on information about the individual candidates' ideologies to place incumbents. In higher-profile Senate elections, the difference between challengers and incumbents is trivial. Decomposing the incumbency advantage into valence and signaling components, I estimate that 14 percent of incumbency advantage in House elections is from the signaling mechanism while it explains only 5 percent of the advantage in Senate contests. I also find that the incumbency advantage is larger in ideologically moderate districts and that a 50 percent increase in party polarization would increase incumbency advantage by 3 percentage points.
The presidential approval rate among a president's co-partisans has received a great deal of attention and is an important quantity for understanding accountability of the executive branch. We show that the reported composition of the president's party is endogenous to presidential popularity, with the party growing and becoming more ideologically moderate as presidential popularity increases. As a result, observed partisan approval rates may be biased due to compositional change in respondents who self-identify with the president's party. We derive bounds on the compositionally-corrected partisan approval rate under a theoretically-motivated monotonicity condition. We examine how the bounds have evolved during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The proportion of survey respondents who identify with the Republican party has decreased rapidly from the pre-election benchmark during the Trump presidency and, as a result, the lower bound on Trump's partisan approval rate is much lower than at a comparable point in the Obama presidency.
We investigate the effect of gubernatorial partisanship on municipal bond issues in the United States using a regression discontinuity design. Our unique dataset of individual bond issues allows us to precisely measure the issuing behavior of different entity types-states, state authorities, and localities-and examine how the response of debt issues to gubernatorial partisanship varies across jurisdictions. The election of Democratic governors results in higher levels of debt issuance, with an annual per capita increase of approximately $73-$147 in states that lack debt referenda requirements. In states with debt referenda requirements, the estimated per capita annual effect of a Democratic governor is approximately $23-$28. We find that governors are not able to circumvent debt referenda requirements by issuing debt through state authorities or local governments.
There is considerable debate about how election timing shapes who votes, election outcomes, and, ultimately, public policy. We examine these matters by combining information on more than 10,000 school tax referenda with detailed micro-targeting data on voters participating in each election. The analysis confirms that timing influences voter composition in terms of partisanship, ideology, and the numerical strength of powerful interest groups. But, in contrast to prominent theories of election timing, these effects are modest in terms of their likely impact on election outcomes. Instead, timing has the most significant impact on voter age, with the elderly being the most overrepresented group in low-turnout special elections. The electoral (and policy) implications of this effect vary between states, and we offer one explanation for this variation.
The relative importance of selection and incentives is essential for understanding how elections structure politicians' behavior. I investigate the relative magnitudes of these two effects in the context of US House members' constituency communication. Consistent with previous research, I find that there is a negative cross-sectional relationship between electoral security and the intensity of constituency communication. The negative relationship holds in a panel-data setting where only within-legislator variation in electoral security is used to identify the effect of electoral security on legislator behavior. Due to the likely presence of myopic voters, the impact of electoral security increases as the election approaches. Point estimates suggest that the total effect is almost entirely driven by incentives, and I am able to reject the hypothesis that the incentive effect is zero at conventional levels of statistical significance.
Advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though intermediary firms. Using a new dataset of revenues and costs of these firms, we study the markups that these firms charge candidates. We find that markups are higher for inexperienced candidates relative to experienced candidates, and PACs relative to candidates. We also find significant differences across the major parties: firms working for Republicans charge higher prices, exert less effort, and induce less responsiveness in their clients' advertising expenditures to electoral circumstances than do their Democratic counterparts. We connect this observation to the distribution of ideology among individual consulting firm employees, arguing that these higher rents incentivize consultants to work against their intrinsic ideological motivations. The internal organization of firms reflects an attempt to mitigate this conflict of interest; firms are composed of ideologically homogeneous employees, and are more likely to work for ideologically proximate clients.
Direct democracy is often touted as a means of reining in the administrative state, but it could also hinder the performance of public organizations. In particular, we argue that bargaining dynamics between voters and government officials can lead to costly administrative disruptions. We explore this issue by estimating the impact of Ohio tax referenda on school district administration using a regression discontinuity approach. The results suggest that administrators in districts where referenda failed sought to insulate core functions from revenue declines. Nonetheless, referendum failure (as opposed to passage) led to lower instructional spending, teacher attrition, and lower student achievement growth. Spending and performance generally rebounded within a few years, however, as districts eventually secured approval for a subsequent tax proposal. These results illustrate how involving citizens in decision-making can entail short-term transaction costs in the form of decreased administrative performance, which in this case may have had lasting achievement effects for students attending school in the wake of a referendum failure.
We assess risk factors affecting the severity and dynamics of civil wars, departing from analyses focused primarily on static models of the effect of income on the extensive margin of conflict. Civil conflicts are shown to be persistent, but rarely do they become more severe in response to past fighting. Substantial heterogeneity in the speed of mean reversion is documented: severe fighting lasts longest in poor countries and ethnically fractionalized countries.
Public education has been transformed by the widespread adoption of accountability systems that involve the dissemination of school district performance information. Using data from Ohio, we examine if elections serve as one channel through which these accountability systems might lead to improvements in educational quality. We find little evidence that poor performance on widely disseminated state and federal indicators has an impact on school board turnover, the vote share of sitting school board members, or superintendent tenure, suggesting that the dissemination of district performance information puts little (if any) electoral pressure on elected officials to improve student achievement.
Federal governments are increasingly employing empirical measures of lower-level
government performance to ensure that provincial and local jurisdictions pursue
national policy goals. We call this burgeoning phenomenon performance federalism
and argue that it can distort democratic accountability in lower-level
elections. We estimate the impact of a widely publicized federal indicator of
local school district performance -- one that we show does not allow voters to
draw valid inferences about the quality of local educational institutions -- on
voter support for school tax levies in a U.S. state uniquely appropriate for this
analysis. The results indicate that a signal of poor district performance increases
the probability of levy failure -- a substantively large and robust effect that
disproportionately affects impoverished communities. The analysis employs a
number of identification strategies and tests for multiple behavioral mechanisms
to support the causal interpretation of these findings.
Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their partisan versus nonpartisan nature of agenda formation, and by whether the amendment process is open or closed. For each organization, roll call voting data are Monte-Carlo generated and used as input for four different ideal point measures: standard percent-correct interest group ratings (IGRs), linear factor analysis scores (LFAs), W-NOMINATE ratings (NOMs), and Markov chain Monte Carlo measures (MCMCs). Three questions motivate and are addressed the analysis. Do estimated ideal points differ significantly across forms of legislative organization? Are some ideal point estimates consistently more accurate than others? Are there patterns of substantively relevant, persistent bias in ideal point estimates? The answers are all affirmative.
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| Replication Data |