CAREER: Political Institutions and the Distribution of Public Resources

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Forty-five years ago Blacks who tried to exercise their right to vote might have met with violence. Today, a Black man is president. In forty years, Blacks have made great progress in political representation in elected offices at all levels. While the voting record of representatives of varying races has been examined repeatedly, there is little evidence on whether increased Black representation results in an increasing flow of public resources to Black communities. More generally, there is a dearth of rigorous research on how political institutions impact the distribution of public goods across communities. This research project consists of three studies to address this hole in the literature and to begin to disseminate findings, beyond the usual scholarly outlets, through an interdisciplinary undergraduate course and policy briefs for stakeholders. The three projects derive their intellectual merit from their tie to the political economy literature. They derive their broader impacts from their implications for public policy. The first project aims to describe the pattern of the distribution of public resources across neighborhoods over time. By collecting 40 years of detailed data on the placement of pools, fire stations, and other public goods in the Philadelphia, this study will provide the first descriptive evidence on question such as: 1) Do the same neighborhoods continue to "win" a larger share of political resources over time 2) How does the distribution of goods across neighborhoods of varying racial compositions change as the race of the elected officials varies? The second project exploits a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act which exogenously increased the number of Blacks in Congress to identify whether there is a causal link between representative race and the distribution of resources across communities. The work will speak to the literature on how identity shapes political behavior, using an arguably more important and more tangible outcome than has been used in previous work. The work is also relevant to the decennial discussion on how to draw districts for federal and state legislatures. The final project will also inform the redistricting debate. While congressional districts must contain roughly equal numbers of United States residents, they are not designed to equilibrate the number of eligible voters. This distinction is particularly important when it comes to the non-voting incarcerated population. While the majority of these non-voting prisoners are Black and hail from urban areas, the majority of prisons are increasingly located in predominately White rural counties. Thus if we consider the ratio of representatives to eligible voters, these largely rural prison counties are overrepresented relative to the average county. In this context, the final study tests the theoretical supposition that as the ratio of constituents to representatives rises, the resources that the representative brings home to the district falls. Broader impacts will come from integrating these findings into the principal investigator's public finance and political economy courses. In addition, these studies at the intersection of economics and political science will form the basis of a new undergraduate course in Ethics, Politics and Economics, an interdisciplinary major for which the principal investigator serves on the advisory board. As it is important to educate not only the leaders of tomorrow, but also those who make redistricting decisions today, the principal investigator will further use her journalistic training to author policy briefs for dissemination to stakeholders.