Research
Race, Civil Rights, and Democracy
Affirmative action programs in public sector agencies are a canonical example of race-conscious remedial policy. While these regimes increase public sector diversity, conventional wisdom suggests that they may have also generated political backlash, increasing support for the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. Yet, there has been little study of potential backlash to the implementation of local affirmative action policies. Exploiting the onset of court-mandated affirmative action plans in U.S. law enforcement agencies, difference-in-differences estimates suggest a positive effect of affirmative action on Democratic vote shares. These partisan effects are not driven by increased overall turnout, but we find some evidence of increased support for affirmative action. Although the potential for endogeneity merits caution, these results thus paint a nuanced picture of the political consequences of race-conscious social policy.
The local reaction to unauthorized Mexican migration to the US.
We study the political impacts of unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States. Our identification strategy relies on two shift-share instruments that combine variation in migration inflows and migrant networks using data on more than 7 million likely unauthorized migrants who obtained consular IDs. We identify evidence of conservative electoral and policy responses at the level of a US county. Unauthorized migration significantly increases the vote share of the Republican Party in federal elections and decreases total public expenditure. We also find that the allocation of public expenditure shifts away from education towards policing and the administration of justice.
We find evidence in favor of three interrelated mechanisms: economic grievance, reflected in formal job loss in “migrant-intensive” sectors and an associated increase in the number of poor people; out-migration, White flight, and population decline; and an increase in out-group bias, as manifested in reduced moral universalism. Unauthorized migration inflows have no discernible impact on total employment, average wages, unemployment, or crime rates. We find some evidence to suggest that the political and socioeconomic impacts of unauthorized migration are smaller in counties that have more progressive taxation or a more generous social safety net, suggesting that these policies can facilitate job switching and prevent a change in values.