No abstract

Despite a century of efforts to constrain money in American elections, there is little consensus on whether campaign finance regulations make any appreciable difference. Here we take advantage of a change in the campaign finance regulations of half of the U.S. states mandated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. This exogenously imposed change in the regulation of independent expenditures provides an advance over the identification strategies used in most previous studies. Using a generalized synthetic control method, we find that after Citizens United, states that had previously banned independent corporate expenditures (and thus were “treated” by the decision) adopted more “corporate-friendly” policies on issues with broad effects on corporations’ welfare; we find no evidence of shifts on policies with little or no effect on corporate welfare. We conclude that even relatively narrow changes in campaign finance regulations can have a substantively meaningful influence on government policy making.

Has the pandemic exacerbated gender inequality in academia? We provide real- time evidence by analyzing 1.8 million tweets from approximately 3,000 political scientists, leveraging their use of social media for career advancement. Using automated text analysis and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that although faculty members of both genders were affected by the pandemic, the shift to remote work caused women to tweet less often than their male colleagues about professional accomplishments. We argue that these effects are driven by the increased familial obligations placed on women, as demonstrated by the increase in family-related tweets and the more pronounced effects among junior academics. Our evidence demonstrating the gendered shift in professional visibility during the pandemic provides the opportunity for proactive efforts to address disparities that otherwise may take years to manifest.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended every aspect of American life. State governments responded quickly to protect public health and stabilize overwhelmed hospital systems. The most restrictive policy, the stay-at-home order, was seen by public health officials as a cornerstone of successful state mitigation strategies. But like many aspects of contemporary politics, support for these efforts took on a distinctly partisan hue. In this paper, I argue that party politics significantly affected state policy responses to COVID-19, which in turn limited mitigation efforts. To this point, I first demonstrate that Democratic governors were faster and more likely to adopt stay-at-home orders than Republicans. Next, using a synthetic control approach, I show that these orders caused residents to practice greater social distancing. Finally, I find that greater social distancing worked to “flattened the curve” by limiting the growth of COVID-19 cases. Together these findings show how party politics affected state pandemic responses and have important long-term implications as states begin lifting restrictions.