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
Accepted at the American Political Science Review
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
Conditionally accepted at the Journal of
Politics
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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Barriers to Representation: Selection Processes and Political
Diversity in US Urban Bureaucracy
2024 Best Paper Award, APSA Urban and Local
Politics Section
Abstract
A rich body of research emphasizes the importance of a representative
bureaucracy for public service provision, and reveals significant gaps
in the representation of partisan and racial groups in street-level
bureaucracies. What drives such misrepresentation across and within
agencies in professionalized local bureaucracies? Using a unique dataset
that tracks the characteristics and career trajectories of over 300,000
bureaucrats in New York City, this study presents three key findings.
First, there is notable sorting across agencies, with the police, fire,
and sanitation departments exhibiting a strong Republican, white, and
male predominance. Second, focusing specifically on recruitment at the
NYPD, I find that despite minimal disparities in both representation and
qualification among exam-takers, Republican and White candidates are
more likely to get hired. Counterfactual analyses indicate that
equalizing hiring rates across demographic groups could increase the
recruitment of underrepresented groups by up to 57%. Third, once hired,
Republican and White officers are also more likely to be promoted,
receive more departmental awards, and enjoy longer tenures compared to
their non-White and Democratic counterparts. By offering new evidence on
the determinants and institutional context of bureaucratic
representation, this study calls for a more nuanced understanding of how
and when it impacts governance outcomes.
pdf
Works in Progress