Research

Opioid overdose death rates have continued to spike exponentially from the start of the 21st century, creating what is known to be one of the worst public health crises in the United States. Simultaneously, as more states began passing medical cannabis laws (MCLs), the idea that marijuana was the solution to the opioid crisis began to spread nationwide. As some states have maintained strict medical marijuana policies, others—such as Colorado—have expanded their statutes to allow recreational marijuana sales within their state. Researchers have been able to provide sense of the public health implications resulting from MCLs, but little is known about the effects of this marijuana policy expansion. This preliminary study will focus on exploring the statewide effects of Colorado's recreational marijuana policy on the state's opioid overdose death rates.

Because Colorado has existing panel data for opioid overdose death rates, we can use statistical software to define and create an optimal control group to adequately resemble Colorado's outcome variable of interest. This process known as the synthetic control method can provide a valid counterfactual for Colorado's opioid overdose outcomes in the absence of this policy—a Colorado that did not expand marijuana policy to the point recreational dispensaries were established.

Opioid overdose death rate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) will be used to construct a synthetic control unit composed of a donor pool of states resembling Colorado's regulatory environment pertaining to marijuana before legalization. The synthetic control unit allows for a comparative observation of overdose rate trends in Colorado and its synthetic counterpart for the years 1999–2017, all while including a set of predictor variables for robustness checks. A difference-in-difference estimate will then help us observe the effects of the treatment given to Colorado. Inference tests will be conducted to evaluate the method's predictive power and significance of the results.

The results of the synthetic control model and its outcomes showed that the estimated negative 5% drop in overdose death rates was deemed insignificant on conducting a placebo in-space analysis, meaning there is not enough evidence to prove that opening recreational dispensaries as a result of recreational marijuana legislation was instrumental in reducing Colorado's ongoing opioid crisis depicted through opioid overdose deaths.

This study investigates whether minority (Black and Latine) Congressmembers are more inclined than White legislators to engage in cooperative behaviors via bill cosponsorship, both within their own racial and ethnic groups and with White legislators. Building upon theories of social identity and marginalized electoral vulnerability, I examine whether minority legislators strategically cosponsor bills introduced by White legislators more frequently than White legislators cosponsor bills introduced by minority legislators. By analyzing cosponsorship patterns from multiple congressional sessions and employing fixed-effects Seemingly Unrelated Negative Binomial Regression (SUNBR) models, I provide a nuanced understanding of how identity influences legislative collaboration.

This study examines whether racial differences in legislative behavior, specifically bill sponsorship and cosponsorship, exist between Minority (Black and Latino) and Non-minority (White) legislators in the U.S. Congress, even after accounting for electoral conditions such as district competitiveness and changes in House majority control. Using data from the 95th to the 117th Congresses, I employ Propensity Score Matching (PSM) using Gradient Boosting (GB) to create comparable groups of Minority and White legislators. Following matching, I implement a Multilevel Model (MLM) with fixed effects for congressional sessions to analyze how individual-level factors, district characteristics, and temporal political environments influence bill sponsorship and cosponsorship. This study’s findings aim to provide a nuanced understanding of how race and electoral conditions interact to shape legislative strategies over time, contributing to the broader discourse on representation and policymaking in a diverse political landscape.

This audit experiment examines the responsiveness of Mexican legislators to constituents from different racial groups through an email experiment using simulated constituents with racially coded names. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive the same message from one of three constituent profiles: Indigenous, mestiza, or European. The findings reveal that legislators responded more frequently and were more likely to engage with the Indigenous profile compared to the mestiza and European profiles. This study fills a notable gap in the literature by centering indigeneity in audit experiments, which has been largely overlooked. Additionally, it represents the first audit study to explore racial discrimination in the context of Mexican politics.

This study explores the relationship between perceptions of procedural and distributive justice and burnout among local government employees, using data from a 2018 survey of over 1,000 employees in Los Angeles County. Testing the Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model, we applied a series of OLS regressions to examine the impact of fairness perceptions on burnout outcomes. The results show that lower perceptions of procedural fairness are strongly associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. While distributive fairness also affects burnout, its influence is less pronounced. Significant variations are observed across gender and racial groups, with women of color experiencing the highest levels of emotional exhaustion and cynicism. These findings underscore the importance of procedural fairness in reducing burnout and highlight the need for equitable processes to improve employee well-being and retention in local government settings.

The extant literature on bureaucratic delegation outlines the political conditions under which principals should delegate discretion to agents and offers a variety of procedural and ex-post mechanisms for controlling agent behavior. These studies, however, often focus on bureaucrats at the federal level. This national focus obscures how theories of political control translate into environments in which bureaucrats have tremendous discretion, as is true for policing. To what extent are efforts to reduce the discretion of street-level bureaucrats successful in affecting bureaucratic behavior? We address the question by assessing the impact of a 2022 departmental change in the criteria needed for LAPD officers to conduct pretextual stops, in effect reducing police discretion by requiring evidence of both a traffic violation and “articulable information.” Using traffic stop data from the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 and employing a synthetic difference-in-difference design to construct a synthetic LAPD from departments across California, we find that the policy change on average reduced the proportion of pretextual stops conducted by ten percentage points. Consistent with street-level bureaucracy theory, however, our evidence suggests that officers exert considerable influence over the implementation of policy and the threat of departmental sanctions.

Currently, Congress is at its highest peak of racial diversity—with 27% of legislators identifying as non-white. While there is plenty written about how institutional factors influence sponsorship and cosponsorship activity, scholarship continues to tell us little about how race and ethnicity do so. How does the race and ethnicity of a legislator impact the way they sponsor and cosponsor bills? I leverage the quasi-experimental nature of the 2016 and 2018 congressional elections to employ a synthetic difference-in-difference (SDID) estimator that causally estimates the impact of minority legislators. I find that, on average, minority legislators sponsor fewer bills than non-minority legislators and greatly cosponsor more legislation. These negative effects on bill sponsorship are exacerbated when minority legislators out-primary an incumbent. The implications of these findings highlight the constraints that minority legislators have to influence policy at the legislative level.

This study explores how police officers, as street-level bureaucrats, shape public perceptions of policy representation and state legitimacy. While racial disparities in policing are well-documented, less attention is given to how these disparities influence public attitudes. Through a mixed-methods approach, we examine survey data and interviews from Los Angeles residents about their experiences and expectations during traffic stops. Despite sharing similar preferences for respectful and fair treatment, Black and Latino residents report significantly more negative experiences compared to White residents, and perceive a greater gap between their expectations and actual police behavior. These findings highlight that while policy expectations may be consistent across racial groups, the experiences of Black and Latine communities with police differ significantly. This study underscores the need to consider not just formal policies but also the actions of street-level bureaucrats in shaping public attitudes toward the state.

Does the top-two primary increase ideological heterogeneity in parties in state legislatures? We argue and find that the possibility of same-party elections in the top-2 leads to greater diversity within party caucuses in state legislatures; in contrast to closed primary systems. In closed primaries, party caucuses are less ideologically diverse as reelection incentives for all members within the caucus are similar. In top-two states, party caucuses will have greater ideological diversity as some candidates will face primary reelection incentives to move to the extreme; while other candidates will face general election reelection incentives. We test this using a synthetic control model. We find causal evidence that the top-two primary has increased ideological diversity in both the majority and minority party caucuses in some legislative chambers. This effect persists for Democratic party caucuses after adoption of top-two, but this effect for Republican party caucuses is only for a few time periods before it reverts back to pre-treatment lower ideological heterogeneity. Implications for the top-2 and top-4 systems are discussed..

This article aims to investigate how legislators from different racial backgrounds frame and communicate about racial issues such as systemic racism, racial equity, and minority rights on social media and public statements. It will compare the tone sentiment and framing (policy-oriented, personal, narrative) used by Black, Latine, Asian-American, and White legislators in their discussions on race.

This study investigates how legislators prioritize non-rollcall activities—such as constituency service, district outreach, media relations, and fundraising—when anticipating different levels of electoral competition. It also examines how these priorities differ across racial identities, with a focus on how minority legislators may face unique electoral pressures. Using a randomized survey experiment, members of Congress will be primed to expect either a highly competitive or very safe election and asked to rank the importance of various non-rollcall activities for ensuring their electoral success. The findings will provide insights into the intersection of race, electoral strategy, and legislative behavior, contributing to broader discussions about representation and the diverse strategies legislators employ outside of roll-call votes.