Publications

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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