Paper 1: Beyond Educational Attainment: Exploring Education Policy Predictors of Youth Voter Turnout. Individuals with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to vote. Though this associational relationship is one of the most cited in political science, research has only recently confirmed that educational attainment increases voting. However, we still know little about which specific aspects of education matter—beyond years of formal schooling or degrees held. To advance beyond these measures, this paper explores whether state education policy variation in approaches to civics education, academic achievement, social and emotional learning, educational differentiation, and teacher resources can shed light on youth voter turnout (18 to 25 years-olds). Using state-level youth turnout data for national elections between 2010 and 2022 matched with a series of lagged education policy measures, this paper employs a series of two-way fixed effect regression models to explore whether state education policy can shape youth civic engagement. Results show that educational attainment predicts turnout at the state level, though not for young voters. Further, while most lagged measures for civic education, academic achievement, and educational differentiation exhibit no relationship with youth turnout, states with higher policy measures for social and emotional learning and education funding are consistently positively associated with higher turnout rates for youth. These findings illuminate the important dynamics of education that may shape voter turnout. Paper 2: Explaining the Gender Gap in Voting: Civic Returns to Education.In recent decades in the United States, women have outpaced men both at the ballot box and in educational attainment. Since education is closely tied to political participation, this paper considers these two trends in tandem and assesses how much of the gender gap in voting is attributable to educational differences, differential returns to education, or other, non-education related elements. Using comprehensive educational data from Massachusetts students matched with voter records, this paper employs a Blinder-Oaxaca-Kitagawa decomposition to understand how educational attainment and other educational experiences contribute to gender voting differentials. In the sample, women outvote men by 3.85 percentage points in the first possible presidential election that young people can vote in after allowing time to complete college. Results demonstrate that two-thirds of this gap in voting is due to differences in educational attainment by gender, with only some of the remaining third of variation explained by either gendered differences in educational experiences or gendered returns to these educational characteristics. These findings broadly suggest that the gender gap in voting can be explained by a rise in women’s education and that if men reached the educational levels of women, they would vote at similar rates. Paper 3: Navigating the Administrative Burdens of Voting: The Role of Education. The multitude of state election laws enacted in recent years implies a widespread acknowledgement that the “direct costs” of voting matter. Recent studies have affirmed that the costs of voting, such as those imposed by changes in election laws requiring voter identification, can reduce turnout particularly among certain groups. Other work has demonstrated laws that reduce the costs of voting do not always increase turnout. Amidst these conflicting findings, I argue that the impact of changes in the cost of voting are best understood in aggregate, as the process of voting in each state is governed by a web of overlapping laws and requirements. I further argue that increases to the direct costs of voting disproportionately impact areas with less-educated populations. Using two-way fixed effects models for county-level voter turnout in the six presidential elections between 2000 and 2020, I estimate that a standard deviation increase in the aggregate “costs of voting” decrease turnout in U.S. counties by roughly 1.3 percentage points. Additionally, interacting county education rates with changes in costs of voting show that the impacts are concentrated among counties with lower education levels—a one standard deviation increase in the cost of voting only decreases turnout by 0.86 percentage points in highly-educated counties of each state. Echoing work that shows such administrative burdens disproportionately affect less educated individuals, these findings offer suggestive evidence that increases in the costs of voting push less educated individuals out of the electorate.

This dissertation examines Latino political engagement, why it occurs at lower rates comparedto other racial/ethnic groups, and factors that may prove influential in bridging such gaps in political engagement. Much of the existing literature on the turnout gap, a persistent double-digit average disparity in voter turnout between Latinos and other U.S racial/ethnic groups has not yet grappled with the empirical fact that such disparities appear before Americans are of voting age. Additionally, we know little about forces that shape Latino’s decision to engage in other forms of political participation such as running for political office. I argue that the relative (dis)engagement of Latinos can be better understood by analyzing differences in the development of norms regarding political engagement. In my first dissertation paper, I leverage decades of longitudinal survey data to assess differences in the early political development of racial/ethnic groups in the United States. I find substantial heterogeneity in the development of political interest, engagement, and attitudes among racial and ethnic groups. I also demonstrate that voting aspirations among Latino youth exist well before they reach voting age. In the second study, I employ two survey experiments to test causal arguments regarding the influence of potential socialization agents on Latino youth: group exemplars. I also conduct focus groups with Latino youth to further describe the mechanisms that drive their voting aspirations. The results show that exemplars, or in-group “role models,” influence the norms and intended voting behavior of young Latinos. Exposure to in-group exemplars coincide with greater levels of intent to vote and increased in-group norms placing emphasis on voting. I also find that the actions exemplars engage in or discuss matter greatly. Observed increases in modes of civic participation outside of voter turnout, such as enthusiasm for political volunteerism, were likely a function of the first intervention’s experimental stimuli. In my final study, I assemble an original dataset of Spanish-language television stations across the United States to study their influence on local-level candidate emergence and Latino turnout. The results show that Spanish-language television access has a negative effect on candidate emergence in areas with high Latino population density, while Latinos in areas that have a low density of co-ethnics are mobilized by access to stations. The results add further complexity to the debate on ethnic media and Latino political participation as the observed effects appear to depend on ethnoracial political context.

This thesis asks what conditions elevated the Cambridge Analytica (CA) conflict into a sustained and global political issue? Was this a privacy conflict and if so, how was it framed as such? This work demonstrates that the public outcry to CA formed out of three underlying structural conditions: The rise of the alt-right as an ideology, surveillance capitalism, and a growing and unregulated voter analytics industry. A network of actors seized the momentum of this conflict to drive the message that voter surveillance is a threat to democratic elections. These actors humanized the CA conflict and created a catalyst for a large scale public outrage to these previously ignored structures. Their focus on democratic threat also allowed this conflict to transcend the typical contours of a privacy conflict and demonstrate that the consequences of CA are societal, rather than personal. Despite the democratic threat of voter surveillance, Canada and the United States have yet to address the wider implications of voter surveillance adequately. Thus, how these systems are used will be a question of central importance in upcoming elections. / Graduate

Essay 1 (with Mikael Elinder): We show that house prices in general did not respond to a large cut in the property tax in Sweden. Our estimates are based on rich register data covering more than 100,000 sales over a time period of two and a half years. Because the Swedish property tax is national and thus unrelated to local public goods, our setting is ideal for causal identification of the property tax on house prices. Our result that house prices did not respond to the tax cut at the time of implementation cannot be explained by early capitalization at the time of announcement. Two other stories appear to explain our results. First, it is possible that house buyers expect an offsetting increase in the supply of housing. Second, house buyers might simply not understand how the tax cut affects total future costs of owning a house. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to disentangle the two mechanisms, and we must therefore conclude that both may be relevant. Essay 2:  I investigate government consumption smoothing (sensitivity) under a balanced budget rule in Swedish municipalities. In general, I find Swedish municipalities to be highly consumption sensitive. Municipalities consume 87.6% out of predicted current revenues in the time period leading up to the implementation of the balanced budget rule, and they consume 76.3% out of predicted current revenue in thetime period following the implementation. Fiscally weak municipalities are found to be more consumption sensitive than fiscally strong municipalities. Very weak municipalities have become more consumption sensitive compared with very strong municipalities since the implementation of the balanced budget rule. Thus, I find indicative evidence that both credit market constraints and formal budget rules such as balanced budget rules increase municipal consumption sensitivity Essay 3: Using the Swedish municipal sector as my political laboratory, I study the effect of a coalition partner on policy outcomes. I use a version of Regression-Discontinuity Design (RDD) specifically suited to proportional systems to define close elections, which can be used for identifying the effect of the Left Party as coalition partner to the Social Democrats. The Left Party is found to have a positive and medium sized effect on the municipal income tax rate. The positive effect is in line with what we expect given the policy preferences of Left Party representatives, but also given the predictions from political fragmentation theory. I find no effects on expenditures or debt, and the negative result for investments is not robust. Essay 4 (with Linuz Aggeborn): In a model where voters and politicians have different preferences for how much to spend on basic welfare services contra immigration, we conclude that established politicians that are challenged by right-wing populists will implement a policy with no spending on immigration if the cost of immigration is high enough. Additionally, adjustment to right-wing populist policy is more likely when the economy is in a recession. Voters differ in their level of private consumption in such a way that lower private consumption implies higher demand for basic welfare services at the expense of immigration, and thus stronger disposition to support right-wing populist policies. We propose that this within-budget-distributional conflict can arise as an electorally decisive conflict dimension if parties have converged to the median voter on the size-of-government issue. / <p>Felaktigt isbn: 978-91-85519-61-3</p>

The overall objective of the thesis is to investigate needs and incentives of all income/wealth groups in order to explore ways and means to remedy the excessive economic inequality. A closer examination of individual decisions across richer and poorer households allows us to recognize conflicts of wants, needs and values and subsequently to draw recommendations for future policies. The first chapter examines households' preferences over the redistribution of wealth resources. The preferences of voting households are restricted by agents' present and future resource constraints. The wealth resources vary over the business cycle, which affects the grounds for speculations of voting households. We augment the standard Real-Business-Cycle (RBC) model by the majority voting on lump-sum redistribution employing a balanced government budget. Our findings indicate that for the usual elasticity of labor supply both transfers' level and share of output are procyclical, with the procyclicality increasing in the discrepancy between richer and poorer households. In the second chapter we analytically demonstrate that all economic agents face subsistence costs that hinder economic and financial decisions of the poor. We find that the standard two-asset portfolio-selection model with a time-invariant subsistence component in the common-across agents Stone-Geary utility function is capable of explaining qualitatively and quantitatively three empirical regularities: (i) increasing saving rates in wealth, (ii) rising risky portfolio shares with wealth, (iii) more volatile consumption growth of the richer. On the contrary, &quot;keeping-up-with-the-Joneses&quot; utility with a time-varying weighted mean consumption produces identical saving rates and portfolio asset shares across richer and poorer agents, failing to match the micro data. Finally, in the third chapter we use Epstein-Zin-Weil recursive preferences altered to include subsistence costs, as this form of utility function enables trade-off between stability and safety. We pursue an analytical investigation of a more complex multi-asset portfolio-choice model with perfectly insurable labor risk and no liquidity constraints and find further support of the data evidence. If households' total resources are anticipated to increase over time, poorer agents can afford to gradually escape subsistence concerns by choosing lower saving rates and accepting only minor portfolio risks as their consumption hovers close to the subsistence needs. The calibration part of the model economy shows that analytical results can quantitatively reconcile the data, too.

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[pt] Os três ensaios que compõem esta tese, têm como objetivo analisar o funcionamento do federalismo fiscal no Brasil. O primeiro analisa as tendências de longo prazo no grau de centralização e no crescimento do governo e sua relação durante o século XX. O achado mais importante deste ensaio é que os processos de descentralização fiscal promovidos pelas Constituições de 1946 e de 1988 aceleraram o crescimento do governo. Esses processos de descentralização provocaram crises no nível federal, que levaram o governo central a aumentar sua receita tributária para compensar a perda de receitas derivada da descentralização de recursos fiscais. Do outro lado, essa descentralização provocou o crescimento da despesa dos estados e municípios, que não foi compensado pela redução da despesa do governo federal. O segundo ensaio analisa a utilização de transferências intergovernamentais como mecanismo de financiamento dos níveis inferiores de governo. Esse ensaio desenvolve um modelo analítico para explicar o efeito expansivo das transferências sobre a despesa das unidades receptoras, conhecido como flypaper effect, e as diferenças regionais na sua intensidade. Usando um modelo de parámetros variando no espaço, o estudo demonstra empíricamente a presença do flypaper effect nas finanças dos municípios brasileros e suas diferenças regionais. Finalmente, o terceiro estuda os determinantes político institucionais do comportamento fiscal dos estados durante o período 1985-1997. O ensaio mostra a existência de ciclos políticos eleitorais, a influência expansionista da fragmentação do sistema partidário sobre a postura fiscal dos estados, a disciplina fiscal imposta pela da participação política da população e o fato de que que administrações estaduais de esquerda tendem a adotar posturas fiscais mais expansionistas do que as adotadas por administrações estaduais de centro ou de direita. / [en] The three essays in this dissertation analyze fiscal federalism in Brazil. The first studies the long run trends of the fiscal centralization and the size of government and their relationship during the XX Century. The most important finding of the first essay is that the process of decentralization inspired by the 1946 and 1948 Constitutions led to an overall expansion of government activities (at the federal, state, and municipal levels). The increase in state and municipal expenditures - because of the decentralization of fiscal resources - was not matched by an equivalent reduction in federal expenditures. Because federal expenditures did not decrease accordingly, and because the decentralization of fiscal resources resulted in a loss of federal revenues, the federal government needed to increase taxes in order to narrow the deficit. The second essay analyzes the use of intergovernmental transfers to finance lower levels of government. The essay develops an analytical model to explain both the expansive effects of transfers on the expenditures of recipient governments, called the flypaper effect. as well as reasons for their regional differences. Using an space-parameter varying estimation, the study empirically demonstrates the expansive effects of intergovernmental and detects their regional differences in Brazilian local governments finances. Finally, the third essay argues that political cycles strongly influenced the fiscal behavior of Brazilian states between 1985 and 1997. The study confirms the existence of political cycles, the influence of political fragmentation, the fiscal discipline induced by the participation of the population and that left wing administrations tended to adopt more expansionary fiscal policies than center or right wing administrations.

This item contains the agenda, minutes, and attachments for the Faculty Senate meeting on this date. There may be additional materials from the meeting available at the Faculty Center. / Minutes originally posted on Dec. 3rd, 2013; correction made to minutes and reposted on Feb. 3rd, 2014.

This thesis is concerned with recursive partitioning of models of a generalized linear model type (GLM-type), i.e., maximum likelihood models with a linear predictor for the linked mean, a topic that has received constant interest over the last twenty years. The resulting tree (a ''model tree'') can be seen as an extension of classic trees, to allow for a GLM-type model in the partitions. In this work, the focus lies on applied and computational aspects of model trees with GLM-type node models to work out different areas where application of the combination of parametric models and trees will be beneficial and to build a computational scaffold for future application of model trees. In the first part, model trees are defined and some algorithms for fitting model trees with GLM-type node model are reviewed and compared in terms of their properties of tree induction and node model fitting. Additionally, the design of a particularly versatile algorithm, the MOB algorithm (Zeileis et al. 2008) in R is described and an in-depth discussion of how the functionality offered can be extended to various GLM-type models is provided. This is highlighted by an example of using partitioned negative binomial models for investigating the effect of health care incentives. Part 2 consists of three research articles where model trees are applied to different problems that frequently occur in the social sciences. The first uses trees with GLM-type node models and applies it to a data set of voters, who show a non-monotone relationship between the frequency of attending past elections and the turnout in 2004. Three different type of model tree algorithms are used to investigate this phenomenon and for two the resulting trees can explain the counter-intuitive finding. Here model tress are used to learn a nonlinear relationship between a target model and a big number of candidate variables to provide more insight into a data set. A second application area is also discussed, namely using model trees to detect ill-fitting subsets in the data. The second article uses model trees to model the number of fatalities in Afghanistan war, based on the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war diary. Data pre-processing with a topic model generates predictors that are used as explanatory variables in a model tree for overdispersed count data. Here the combination of model trees and topic models allows to flexibly analyse database data, frequently encountered in data journalism, and provides a coherent description of fatalities in the Afghanistan war. The third paper uses a new framework built around model trees to approach the classic problem of segmentation, frequently encountered in marketing and management science. Here, the framework is used for segmentation of a sample of the US electorate for identifying likely and unlikely voters. It is shown that the framework's model trees enable accurate identification which in turn allows efficient targeted mobilisation of eligible voters. (author's abstract)

This thesis focuses on the impact of negative political advertising on voters in the Czech Republic. Evaluation and perception of negative political advertising, information effect, impact on the assessment and perception of political subjects and impact on voter turnout are examined specifically. To test proposed hypothesis, data from a survey and from a time and content analysis of political ads in the selected daily newspaper are used.