Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to
have negligible effects on election outcomes. We offer an analytical framework to explain …

In the United States, elections are often administered by directly elected local officials who
run as members of a political party. Do these officials use their office to give their party an …

Political actors frequently manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a
process commonly known as gerrymandering. To address this problem, several states have …

Abstract In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court struck down a core provision
of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that enabled federal electoral oversight in select jurisdictions …

Voter suppression often relies on ostensibly non-racial measures that exploit pre-existing
social structures to generate racial disenfranchisement. Yet evidence about the empirical …

This dissertation consists of three essays that contribute to the fields of political economy
and public economics. Chapter 1 studies the effect of Virginia's 2014 voter ID law on political …

The proliferation of voter ID laws across the US has had an ambiguous impact on turnout
rates among registered voters, despite fear from civil-rights advocates that these laws would …