Publications
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Sorting for K-Street: Post-Employment Regulations and Wage Setting in
Congress
The Journal of Politics, 2025, 87(2):664-679
Abstract
While post-employment regulations are a common tool to slow the
revolving door in government, little is known about their effectiveness
and consequences. Using the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government
Act (HLOGA), I argue that policymakers strategically adjust their
behaviors to maintain lucrative career options in the lobbying industry.
HLOGA prohibited staffers-turned-lobbyists who earn at least 75% of a
Congress member’s salary from contacting their ex-employers in Congress
for one year. Using data on the complete set of congressional staff
(2001-2016), I show that staffers sort below the salary threshold
post-HLOGA. Employing various panel data analyses, I also find that
selecting out of the regulation increases a staffer’s probability to
become a lobbyist and ensures a substantial premium in revenues at the
beginning of their lobbying career. These results explain why reforms of
the revolving door fail and provide insights on institutional
determinants of career incentives for non-elected public officials.
article
appendix
replication
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Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation,
Inference and Validation Resources for 157 Languages
with
Pedro L. Rodriguez,
Arthur Spirling, and
Brandon M.
Stewart
Political Analysis, 2025, 33(2):156-163
2022 PolMeth Best Poster Award
Abstract
Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain high quality embeddings for
non-English languages, and it may be computational expensive to do so.
In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical
comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, but this is
non-trivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources
designed to ameliorate the union of these issues: (1) a new version of
fastText model embeddings, fit to Wikipedia corpora; (2) a
multi-language “a la carte” (ALC) embedding version of the
fastText model fit to Wikipedia corpora; (3) a multi-language
ALC embedding version of the well-known GloVe model fit to
Wikipedia corpora. These materials are aimed at “low resource” users who
lack access to large corpora in their language of interest, or who lack
access to the computational resources required to produce high-quality
vector representations. We make these resources available for 30
languages, along with a code pipeline for another 127 languages
available from Wikipedia corpora. We provide extensive validation of the
materials, via reconstruction tests and some translation
proofs-of-concept. We also conduct and report on human crowdworker
tests, for our embeddings for Arabic, French, (traditional, Mandarin)
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.
article
appendix
resources
replication
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Bureaucratic Resistance and Policy Inefficiency
with
Kun Heo
American Political Science Review, 2026
Abstract
Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for
incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit
this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral
politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of
uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on
post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats
can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most
likely when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo.
Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for
voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When
reform is moderately popular, resistance prevents beneficial reforms due
to electoral risks and induces ineffective reforms by providing
bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of
bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability.
article
appendix
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Political Power of Bureaucratic Agents: Evidence from Policing in New
York City
Journal of Politics, 2026
Abstract
To what extent can bureaucrats manipulate public service provision for
explicitly political ends? A growing body of work highlights the immense
ability of bureaucrats to influence governments through campaign
contributions, endorsements, collective bargaining, and organized
election turnout. I explore a more fundamental mechanism of bureaucratic
influence: bureaucrats strategically shirking responsibilities.
Politicians depend on bureaucrats to achieve policy goals. This gives
the latter leverage over the former. If bureaucrats deviate in their
preferences from politicians and are organized in cohesive unions with
strong tenure protections, they can collectively reduce effort to exert
political pressure. I use data on New York Police Department (NYPD) 911
response times together with council members’ preferences on the FY2021
$1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget. Employing difference-in-differences
and spatial difference-in-discontinuities designs, I find that police
reduced effort in districts of non-aligned politicians by slowing
response times. This study informs the theoretical debate on
principal-agent relationships in government and highlights the
importance of organized political interests to explain policing in US
cities.
article
appendix
replication
Working Papers
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The Limits of Merit: Career Pipelines and Representation in US Law
Enforcement
2024 Best Paper Award,
APSA Urban and Local Politics Section
Abstract
US police departments are systematically Whiter and more Republican than
the populations they serve, even within formally meritocratic civil
service systems. What drives political sorting in these systems?
Existing scholarship and decades of diversification reform have focused
on the written entry exam, yet bureaucratic careers extend well beyond
entry. Drawing on novel data linking civil service exam records,
payroll, promotion, attrition, and voter registrations for over 99,000
entry-level exam takers and 58,000 sworn officers at the New York City
Police Department, this study traces how selection processes create and
reinforce workplace stratification across bureaucratic careers. While
the entry exams produce some sorting by partisanship, they are
insufficient to explain the representational gaps that emerge. Even
among applicants with comparable exam scores, the post-exam hiring stage
favors Republican and White candidates, who are subsequently more likely
to be promoted, receive awards, and remain with the agency over time.
Equalizing rates at the discretionary hiring stage alone would increase
the appointment of Democratic and Black candidates by 78% and 27%,
respectively. These findings redirect attention from the entry exam to
the bureaucratic pipeline, and reveal how bureaucratic institutions can
sustain stratification despite formal meritocratic rules.
pdf
Works in Progress