Daniel J. Hopkins

Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition

In ethnic and racial terms, America is growing rapidly more diverse. Yet attempts to extend racial threat hypotheses to todays immigrants have generated inconsistent results. This article develops the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening. Hostile political reactions to neighboring immigrants are most likely when communities undergo sudden influxes of immigrants and when salient national rhetoric reinforces the threat. Data from several sources, including twelve geocoded surveys from 1992 to 2009, provide consistent support for this approach. Time-series cross-sectional and panel data allow the analysis to exploit exogenous shifts in salient national issues such as the September 11 attacks, reducing the problem of residential self-selection and other threats to validity. The article also tests the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies. By highlighting the interaction of local and national conditions, the politicized places hypothesis can explain both individual attitudes and local political outcomes.

The Constraining Power of International Treaties: Theory and Methods

We acknowledge the contribution of von Stein (2005) in calling attention to the very real problem of selection bias in estimating treaty effects. Nonetheless, we dispute both von Steins theoretical and empirical conclusions. Theoretically, we contend that treaties can both screen and constrain simultaneously, meaning that findings of screening do nothing to undermine the claim that treaties constrain state behavior as well. Empirically, we question von Steins estimator on several grounds, including its strong distributional assumptions and its statistical inconsistency. We then illustrate that selection bias does not account for much of the difference between Simmonss (2000) and von Steins (2005) estimated treaty effects, and instead reframe the problem as one of model dependency. Using a preprocessing matching step to reduce that dependency, we then illustrate treaty effects that are both substantively and statistically significant—and that are quite close in magnitude to those reported by Simmons.

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.

No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead About Black and Female Candidates

The 2008 election renewed interest in the Wilder or Bradley effect, the gap between the share of survey respondents expressing support for a candidate and the candidates vote share. Using new data from 180 gubernatorial and Senate elections from 1989 to 2006, this paper presents the first large-sample test of the Wilder effect. It demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was Governor of Virginia. Evidence from the 2008 presidential election reinforces this claim. Although the same mechanisms could affect female candidates, this paper finds no such effect at any point in time. It also shows how polls’ overestimation of front-runners’ support can exaggerate estimates of the Wilder effect. Together, these results accord with theories emphasizing how short-term changes in the political context influence the role of race in statewide elections. The Wilder effect is the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to underrepresented groups.

The Diversity Discount: When Increasing Ethnic and Racial Diversity Prevents Tax Increases

According to recent research, racial and ethnic diversity reduces U.S. localities’ investment in public goods. Yet we remain unsure about the mechanisms behind that relationship and uncertain that the relationship is causal. This essay addresses these challenges by studying the impact of racial and ethnic demographics on property tax votes in Massachusetts and Texas. Employing novel time-series cross-sectional data, it departs from the emerging consensus by showing that diversity does not always influence local tax votes. Instead, diversity reduces localities’ willingness to raise taxes only when localities are undergoing sudden demographic changes. Theoretically, this finding points us away from the dominant understanding of diversity as divergent preferences, and towards approaches that emphasize how sudden demographic changes can destabilize residents’ expectations and influence local elites. To understand how diversity influences public good provision, we should look to those towns that are diversifying, not those towns that are diverse.

National Debates, Local Responses: The Origins of Local Concern about Immigration in Britain and the United States

Theories of inter-group threat hold that local concentrations of immigrants produce resource competition and anti-immigrant attitudes. Variants of these theories are commonly applied to Britain and the United States. Yet the empirical tests have been inconsistent. This paper analyses geo-coded surveys from both countries to identify when residents’ attitudes are influenced by living near immigrant communities. Pew surveys from the United States and the 2005 British Election Study illustrate how local contextual effects hinge on national politics. Contextual effects appear primarily when immigration is a nationally salient issue, which explains why past research has not always found a threat. Seemingly local disputes have national catalysts. The paper also demonstrates how panel data can reduce selection biases that plague research on local contextual effects.

The Limited Local Impacts of Ethnic and Racial Diversity

The United States has more immigrants than at any time since the 1920s and immigration rates remain high. Past research unequivocally predicts that the resulting increase in ethnic and racial diversity will reduce local investments in public goods. By analyzing a new, comprehensive data set on U.S. cities from 1950 to 2002, this article challenges those predictions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the percent Black had no strong impacts on local public goods. Since the 1970s, the impact of diversity has been limited chiefly to criminal justice, an issue that has remained racially coded, nationally salient, and relevant to localities. Contrary to past work, diversity’s influence on local public goods is neither pervasive nor consistent. These findings challenge static conceptions of local ethnic and racial divisions, and they suggest a connection between diversity’s local impacts and trends in national politics.

After It’s Too Late

Does a black mayor’s inauguration influence American cities’ policies? The heated rhetoric surrounding some black–white elections suggests that it might. Past research is divided. Yet this question has not been addressed in years or with many observations. This article uses novel data sets including 167 elections and 108 black mayors to examine their impact on fiscal and employment policies. Empirically it uses multiple approaches including regression discontinuity design. In most observable policy areas, the inauguration of a black mayor leads to policies that are indistinguishable from cities where black mayors do not govern. Police hiring represents an exception, with black mayors hiring more black officers. These results suggest a disconnect between the racially polarized elections that produce black mayors and the governance that follows. They raise concerns about the potential of city elections to induce accountability, and they reinforce the centrality of criminal justice as an urban political issue.

After It’s Too Late: Estimating the Policy Impacts of Black Mayors in U.S. Cities

∗This paper was previously presented at the 2010 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. The authors are grateful for comments or advice from Richard Bensel, Paru Shah, Rafael Sonenshein, Thomas Stratmann, Erik Voeten, and Hal Wolman, and for research assistance from Anton Strezhnev and William Tamplin. Brian Reaves at the Bureau of Justice Statistics kindly assisted with data, and Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko graciously made their data on mayoral elections available.

Flooded Communities: Explaining Local Reactions to the Post-Katrina Migrants

This article uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing in part on a new survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the national concern about issues of race and poverty following Katrina, people in communities that took in evacuees became less supportive of spending to help the poor and African Americans. The results suggest a novel hypothesis that threatened responses to newcomers hinge on both local conditions and the frames that develop around their arrival.