Maxwell Palmer

Demography and Democracy: A Global, District-level Analysis of Electoral Contestation

According to the classical perspective, polity size and democracy are inversely related. In this article, we argue that there is an important exception that manifests itself at the district level in settings where multiparty competition is allowed. Specifically, we find that larger districts encourage greater contestation. This results from a little-noticed mechanical effect as well as from several features of constituencies that are affected by size and have direct repercussions for contestation. To demonstrate this thesis we assembled a unique dataset, the Multi-level Election Archive (MLEA), which unites electoral contests across a variety of districts (national, regional, and local) and elective offices from the eighteenth century to the present, including a total of 88 countries, 2,344 elections, 79,658 districts, and more than 400,000 contests. With this evidence we were able to conduct a broad array of statistical tests, some global and others focused on particular countries or election types, all of which support our general argument.

Capitol Gains: The Returns to Elected Office from Corporate Board Directorships

We frequently observe that politicians accept lucrative private sector employment after leaving office, but we have little systematic evidence that politicians are able to profit from their government service. In this paper, we examine the returns to office that many former senators and governors receive from serving on the boards of directors of publicly traded corporations, part-time positions where the average compensation exceeds

Institutional Control of Redistricting and the Geography of Representation

250,000 per year. We find that almost half of all former senators and governors serve on at least one board after leaving office. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we estimate that winning a Senate or gubernatorial election increases the probability of later serving on a corporate board by roughly 30%. For senators, we find that developing skills and connections through committee service, particularly in areas such as finance or military, is associated with increased board service after leaving office.

City Learning: Evidence of Policy Information Diffusion from a Survey of U.S. Mayors

A number of states have empowered independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) to redraw legislative districts each decade following the US Census. Reformers see IRCs, which have binding authority and political independence, as a solution to the practice of gerrymandering and have proposed using them throughout the United States. With less incentive to protect incumbents, do IRCs adhere more closely to traditional redistricting principles, such as drawing compact districts, maintaining continuity, and respecting political subdivisions? We examine a large sample of congressional and state legislative districts and find that, relative to legislatures, IRCs tend to draw more compact districts, split fewer political subdivisions, and may also do a better job of preserving the population cores of prior districts.

Do Mayors Run for Higher Office? New Evidence on Progressive Ambition

Most studies of policy diffusion attempt to infer the processes through which policies spread by observing outputs (policy adoptions). We approach these issues from the other direction by directly analyzing a key policymaking input—information about others’ policies. Moreover, we do so by investigating policy diffusion in cities rather than states. Using a survey of U.S. mayors, more specifically, mayors’ own lists of cities they look to for ideas, we find evidence that distance, similarity, and capacity all influence the likelihood of a policy maker looking to a particular jurisdiction for policy information. We also consider whether these traits are complements or substitutes and provide some evidence for the latter. Specifically, we find that, at times, mayors eschew similarity and distance to look to highly respected “high capacity” cities but that there is no tradeoff between distance and similarity.

Does the Chief Justice Make Partisan Appointments to Special Courts and Panels

The mayor’s office potentially offers a launchpad for statewide and national political ambitions. We know relatively little, however, about how frequently mayors actually run for higher office, and which mayors choose to do so. This article combines longitudinal data on the career paths of the mayors of 200 big cities with new survey and interview data to investigate these questions. While we find that individual and city traits—especially gender—have some predictive power, the overwhelming story is that relatively few mayors—just under one-fifth—ever seek higher office. We suggest that ideological, institutional, and electoral factors all help to explain why so few mayors exhibit progressive ambition.