Elizabeth Mitchell Elder
Political scientist studying behavior, knowledge, & attitudes towards government. Currently @ Hoover Institution, formerly @ UC Berkeley.
- Here’s a blog post version of my recent paper in BJPS on coal dominance and local government capacity. Thanks, USAPP, for the opportunity to share a more accessible version of this work!
- Company towns have left a lasting legacy of underfunded and underpowered local governments blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderWe're excited to release version 1.0 of the Dynamic Democracy website. It includes updated data on state policy, public opinion, mass ideology, and representation. The website enables you to see how these measures are changing overtime across states and within states. www.dynamicdemocracy.us
- Out today! I argue companies that dominate local economies can durably shape the capacity of local governments. Read on if you’re interested in business power, local political economy, or (for some reason) how coal companies were (not) taxed by early 20th century local governments.
- NEW - Company Towns: Single-Industry Dominance and Local Government Capacity - cup.org/48yJZcG - @elizabethelder.bsky.social #OpenAccess
- And if you just can’t get enough of this, stay tuned for my book coming out early next year! It traces how this dysfunction leaves voters cynical and mistrustful, even after coal companies have left town. Plus many more stories of wild company town corruption: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]
- What a comparison! By the way, with coal in the news this morning...if you're interested in learning more about how the 20th century coal industry's dominance of local governance hollowed out mining areas' faith in institutions, I have a book you can pre-order!
- "Company Towns" by @elizabethelder.bsky.social press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
- Excited to see this out! @hanslueders.bsky.social & I develop a concept & measure of place attachment, distinct from place identity. We show local attachments are similarly strong in urban & rural places, and they predict engagement in local (vs. national) politics. link.springer.com/10.1007/s111...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder📢 The APSR is opening a new Research Notes track! Authors may now submit directly as Notes—or, with editor agreement, have papers reclassified during review. Notes should be ≤7,000 words (excl. refs/appendices).
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 “Good Description” with @annagbusse.bsky.social 🚨 What sets 'good' description apart from 'mere' description? We develop a framework for evaluating descriptive research, whether we are doing it as scholars or assessing it as readers. Two main contributions... 🔗📄 tinyurl.com/gooddesc
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder
We are extremely pleased to announce the preliminary release of the combined pre-election and post-election dataset for the ANES 2024 Time Series Study! The data and documentation can be downloaded from the ANES website at: electionstudies.org/data-center/... Best, The ANES Team - Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderI'm excited to present this today at UAA. If you're in Vancouver, it's at 9:50am at Pavillion B.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderOverlapping CI's do not tell you if 2 estimates are significantly different from one another. These packages in R and Stata can help with this common visualization problem. Fan-freaking-tastic.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderMy book is now officially out! How Politicians Polarize introduces and documents the concept of "negative representation" – when representatives focus on the other side rather than their own. Some key findings: 🧵 www.amazon.com/How-Politici...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderDespite trust in personal doctors becoming a partisan issue, experimental evidence suggests that sharing a political background with one's medical provider increases willingness to seek care, finds @obrian.bsky.social & Bradley Kent in @bjpols.bsky.social doi.org/10.1017/S000...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 New paper (with Kasey Rhee & Nico Studen). We use a new within-precinct design to isolate how ideology affects vote choice holding turnout fixed, analyzing 3.4M precinct observations across state & fed elections (2016-2022). tldr: Ideological moderation affects vote shares, but not by much. 🧵⬇️
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderIn case anyone needs a break from reality (me, by 9 a.m. every day), my coauthor Anna Berg and I have a new, open access essay out in Perspectives! buff.ly/4gN6cFR. We describe the marginalization of qual methods in the study of American political behavior and make a case for their revival.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderWhen Queen Victoria’s mourning disrupted the "London Season" (elite marriage market), peer-commoner intermarriage rose by 40%, marital wealth sorting fell by 30%, and peers' political power declined as a result. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderNew in POQ from Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra and @mayasen.bsky.social, new empirical research on why you should write shorter survey questions academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
- Just looked through this checklist for a survey experiment I'm working on this morning!
- 🚨It's finally got an issue and page numbers 😊 If you ever do survey experiments and maybe, just maybe, sometimes get null results, this article might help you (plus it's Open Access!). www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elderbeing bused to an inner-city school significantly increases White support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later www.nber.org/papers/w33365
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderWe have a new report out. Do Won Kim, Xilin Yang and Do-Hoon Kim reproduce "The Effects of Racial Diversity in Citizen Decision-Making Bodies" by Karpowitz et al. @thejop.bsky.social. Link to the report and author's response below.
- Excited to see this out! We study several hundred mock jury deliberations and find that white deliberators speak more, raise their own preferences more, and step in at more pivotal times in the discussion than deliberators of color. Inequalities persist even in more diverse groups.
- NOW OUT ON FIRSTVIEW! Race, Voice, and Authority in Discussion Groups buff.ly/3C0DdjG By @elizabethelder.bsky.social , @profkarpo.bsky.social & Tali Mendelberg
- We see these findings as helping to explain a pattern we described in earlier work: white jurors' preferences have more influence over their jury's final decision. scholar.google.com/citations?vi...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder[This post could not be retrieved]
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 New year, new working paper 🚨 "In Control but Incoherent: Institutional Power, Electoral Politics, and Message Discipline in Congress" with Gechun Lin (WUSTL). Available here: benjaminnoble.org/files/papers... Read on for the 🧵 version…
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderVery happy to say that I passed my PhD dissertation defense, "The Public Sphere in Private Spaces: Politics, News, and Misinformation in Personal Messaging Applications." Grateful for my advisor, committee, and everyone at Stanford
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderNew paper published @ajpseditor.bsky.social Showing that reduced access to public services fuelled far right support in 🇮🇹 Existing work on far right highlights globalization & migration grievances, what about people’s experiences with the state? We use 🇮🇹 reform to find out shorturl.at/zQ8bJ
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 NEW PAPER: When low-income Americans get $1,000/month for 3 years, what happens to their political views & behavior? The OpenResearch Unconditional income Study reveals surprising findings about the effects of income on politics... 🧵
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderAfter a review process so long and intensive that the title changed twice, I'm excited/relieved that "How to Distinguish Motivated Reasoning from Bayesian Updating" is accepted at @polbehavior.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/os... Here is how it's relevant for your Thanksgiving dinner 🦃👇
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderThrilled to announce the release of Uprooted: How Post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe with Cambridge UP 🎉🎉 The book argues that accommodating the displaced population can strengthen states and benefit local economies in the long run. 📚 [Amazon: tinyurl.com/24m2mbkf] See thread below:
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderWhat attributes of a government lead citizens to view it as trustworthy? Our article - led by @danjdevine.bsky.social - is out in EJPR today... Competence, benevolence and integrity all matter - but perceived benevolence matters most. ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderFor the next few years I’ll be documenting efforts to protect official statistics, including and especially population statistics, from political threats. For more on how this happened between 2016 and 2020, see my forthcoming book: kansaspress.ku.edu/978070063875...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 How should we design surveys to capture opinion in fast-changing contexts like elections or within hard-to-reach communities? 🚨 My paper, conditionally accepted at Political Analysis, develops a method that leverages LLMs and adaptive algorithms to construct surveys that evolve with user input.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderOur new book, Storefront Campaigning, is out *today* and FREE to download until 12/12! doi.org/10.1017/9781... Using original data on field office locations, Sean Whyard and I show where offices are placed - and why they matter in presidential campaigns. (1/x)
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderI'm excited to share a new tool to explore FEC spending data. Working with a team of research assistants, we cleaned, coded, and classified millions of expenditure records. You can access it here: election-spending-data.shinyapps.io/dashboard/
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderA new interesting article by @hankinson.bsky.social and @jdbk.bsky.social is now available on our FirstView page. It is entitled “How self-interest and symbolic politics shape the effectiveness of compensation for nearby housing development”. Enjoy it here: t.ly/-0IQO
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderExcited to share new work with my coauthor, Colin Case! We produce issue-specific estimates for the left-right policy positions of congressional candidates Parts of this project are now under contract w/ CUP's Elements in Quant Methods 🥳 --- feedback welcome!! osf.io/preprints/os...
- Making your APSA schedule? Have a free slot Sunday morning? Stop by our panel on Political Economy and Local Democracy to see this great set of papers! (I'm hearing Beyoncé is unfortunately unlikely to attend)
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder"Roots of Polarization" has a 9/25 release date! In the mean time, plan on coming to the author-meets-critics panel at APSA (Thurs @ 8am). Really great panel: @cwolbrecht.bsky.social, @chriswarshaw.bsky.social and Vince Hutchings discussing, & chaired by Eric Schickler. #polisky tinyurl.com/ycypu4nm
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderDoes policy capacity (ie staff) affect the influence of lobbyists? The Modernization of Committee suggested it does, but it's a hard question to evaluate (legislators usually control their staff levels). In a new paper to come at LSQ, we use a 1990 CA case to show staff limit lobbyist influence
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder#OpenAccess from our latest issue - Personal Economic Shocks and Public Opposition to Unauthorized Immigration - cup.org/3zObMYX - Daniel J. Hopkins, Yotam Margalit & Omer Solodoch
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderInterested in measuring Attentiveness in Self-Administered Surveys? Check out our new review piece published today in Public Opinion Quarterly: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...
- Just a few more days to make nominations--deadline is April 1st!
- Did you see (or present) a great paper at a panel in the Class & Inequality section at APSA '23? Consider nominating it for the best paper award! Instructions for this & other section awards are here: connect.apsanet.org/s45/awards/
- Did you see (or present) a great paper at a panel in the Class & Inequality section at APSA '23? Consider nominating it for the best paper award! Instructions for this & other section awards are here: connect.apsanet.org/s45/awards/
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderMy book, "The Invented State: Misperceptions in the American Public" is out and available to order: www.amazon.com/Invented-Sta.... Here's the argument in a nutshell -- I'll use this thread to expand on each point.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderVery happy to share my paper with Yotam Margalit, now online at PSRM: "Does support for redistribution mean what we think it means?" cup.org/3HthSOR 🧵Here’s a summary thread… 1/
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderOur paper introducing the "American Local Government Elections Database" is online at Scientific Data. The data includes 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests in races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties over the last three decades.
- The blog post version of this article is now up on the JOP site! jop.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/is-diversify...
- Excited to see this online! We use data from a mock jury experiment to show that many people who deliberate with POCs change their minds to be closer to POCs' preferences, but this change rarely translates to *verdicts* closer to POCs' preferences. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder@elizabethelder.bsky.social will present her paper, "Responsiveness to Corruption: Evidence from U.S. Local Governments," with discussant comments by @jpayson.bsky.social (please contact her for a copy)
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderHalloween update 🎃👻: NEW PAPER ALERT 👻🎃: want to learn about how recent findings in HPE are challenging our priors about the origins of state capacity? Here is my Annual Reviews on *Endogenous State Capacity*: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderReally pleased that this new work with Tali Mendelberg, @elizabethelder.bsky.social, and David Ribar is now online at The Journal of Politics: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
- Excited to see this online! We use data from a mock jury experiment to show that many people who deliberate with POCs change their minds to be closer to POCs' preferences, but this change rarely translates to *verdicts* closer to POCs' preferences. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderGot a new working paper w/ @robmickey.bsky.social & @dziblatt.bsky.social tl;dr influxes of Black people during the Great Migration led Northern towns & cities to remove directly elected mayors & replace them w/ appointed city managers design: shift-share IV paper: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/r54lw...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder"How Cable News Reshaped Local Government" by Elliott Ash and Sergio Galletta in AEJ: Applied Economics www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell Elder🚨 Does rurality correspond to more Republican-aligned policy attitudes? In a new short working paper w/ Jennifer Lin cup.org/46oW3dQ, we find that for most major national issues, rural attitudes are partisan and not necessarily more conservative/Republican.
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderFrom Jamie Druckman - opportunity to apply to collect free data! The Civic Health and Institutions Project, a 50 States Survey (CHIP50) is announcing opportunities to collect free state-level or large national sample public opinion data. More information is available here: www.chip50.org
- Reposted by Elizabeth Mitchell ElderWith Yphtach Lelkes & Sam Wolken, I'm excited to release a new paper "The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage." Conditionally accepted American Journal of Political Science URL: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
