Research

My full CV is available here: http://joshuamccrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/McCrain_CV.pdf

Google Scholar Profile

Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Institutional Factors Driving Citizen Perceptions of AI in Government: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Policing” with Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel Schiff, Ian Adams, and Scott Mourtgos
Forthcoming, Public Administration Review
Abstract
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly adopting AI-powered tools. While prior work emphasizes the technological features driving public opinion, we investigate how public trust and support for AI in government vary with the \textit{institutional} context. We administer a pre-registered survey experiment to 4,200 respondents about AI use cases in policing to measure responsiveness to three key institutional factors: bureaucratic proximity (i.e., local sheriff versus national FBI), algorithmic targets (i.e., public targets via predictive policing versus detecting officer misconduct through automated case review), and agency capacity (i.e., necessary resources and expertise). We find that the public clearly prefers local over national law enforcement use of AI, while reactions to different algorithmic targets are more limited and politicized. However, we find no responsiveness to agency capacity or lack thereof. The findings suggest the need for greater scholarly, practitioner, and public attention to organizational, not only technical, prerequisites for successful government implementation of AI.


“Medicaid by Any Other Name? Investigating Malleability of Partisan Attitudes Toward the Public Program “ with Adrianna McIntyre and Danielle Pavliv
2023, Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law
Abstract
Context: Medicaid is the largest health insurance program by enrollment in the United States. The program varies across states across a variety of dimensions, including what it’s called; some states use state-specific naming conventions (e.g., MassHealth in Massachusetts).
Methods: In a pre-registered online survey experiment (n = 5,807), we test whether public opinion shifts in response to the use of state-specific Medicaid program names or the provision of information about program enrollment.
Findings: We find that replacing “Medicaid” with a state-specific name results in a large increase in the share of respondents reporting that they “haven’t heard enough to say” how they feel about the program. This corresponds to a decrease in both favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward the program. Though confusion increases among all partisan groups, there is evidence that the state-specific names may also strengthen positive perceptions among Republicans. Providing enrollment information generally does not affect public opinion.
Conclusions: Our findings offer suggestive evidence that state-specific program names may muddle understanding of the program as a government-provided benefit. Policymakers seeking to bolster support for the program or claim credit for expanding or improving it may be better served simply referring to it as “Medicaid.”


“Local Elections Do Not Increase Local News Demand” with Erik Peterson
Forthcoming, Political Science Research and Methods
Abstract
Anemic demand for local news has contributed to an industry crisis. We consider whether local elections, which highlight the ability of local television stations and newspapers to provide information that is unavailable from national news outlets, increase local media use. While we show these elections are a time of increased attention to local politics in the news and among the public, we also find local media outlets do not benefit from this when considering behavioral news use measures. Relative to news outlets in cities without an election, local television news viewership undergoes a small decline during local elections. Newspaper website traffic is largely stable, although it falls slightly the month after an election. In both cases these differences are small, even when considering close races and those happening off the federal election cycle. This shows limits on the ability of salient local political events to motivate local news use.


A Foot Out The Door: What Drives Bureaucratic Exit Into Lobbying Careers?” with Alexander Bolton
Forthcoming, Political Science Research and Methods
Abstract
The revolving door is a potential mechanism of private influence over policy. Recent work primarily examines the revolving of legislators and their staffs, with little focus on the federal bureaucracy. To analyze decisions to turnover into lobbying, we develop an argument emphasizing the (1) policy expertise acquired from federal employment; (2) the proximity of employees to political decision-making; and (3) the agency policymaking environment. Leveraging federal personnel and lobbying data, we find the first two factors predict revolving whereas the policymaking environment has an inconsistent impact. We highlight the importance of studying selection into lobbying for estimating casual effects of lobbyist characteristics on revenue and contribute to the literature on bureaucratic careers and the nature of private influence in policymaking.


“Public Support for Professional Legislatures” with David Fortunato and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff
2023, State Politics and Policy Quarterly
Abstract
Evidence suggests that well-funded, professional legislatures more effectively provide constituents with their preferred policies and may improve social welfare. Yet, legislative resources across state legislatures have stagnated or dwindled at least in part due to public antagonism toward increasing representatives’ salaries. We argue that one reason voters oppose legislative resources, like salary and staff, is that they are unaware of the potential benefits. Employing a pre-registered survey experiment with a pre–post design, we find that subjects respond positively to potential social welfare benefits of professionalization, increasing support for greater resources. We also find that individuals identifying with the legislative majority party respond positively to potential responsiveness benefits and that out-partisans do not respond negatively to potential responsiveness costs. In a separate survey of political elites, we find similar patterns. These results suggest that a key barrier to increasing legislative professionalism – anticipated public backlash – may not be insurmountable. The findings also highlight a challenge of institutional choice: beliefs that representatives are unresponsive or ineffective lead to governing institutions that may ensure these outcomes.


“Software Citations in Political Science” with Vincent Arel-Bundock
2023, PS: Political Science and Politics
Abstract
Political scientists rely on complex software to conduct research, and much of the software they use is written and distributed for free by other researchers. This article contends that creating and maintaining these public goods is costly for individual software developers but that it is not adequately incentivized by the academic community. We demonstrate that statistical software is used widely but rarely cited in political science, and we highlight a partial solution to this problem: software bibliographies. To facilitate their creation, we introduce softbib, an R package that scans analysis scripts, detects the software used in those scripts, and automatically creates bibliographies. We hope that recognizing the contribution of software developers to science will encourage more scholars to create public goods, which could yield important downstream benefits.


“Lobbyists into Government” with Benjamin C.K. Egerod
2023, Quarterly Journal of Political Science
Abstract
“Revolving door” lobbying describes the back-and-forth transition of individuals between public service and employment in lobbying, raising normative concerns around the role of special interests in public policy. Little, however, is known about individuals who make the transition from lobbying into government. Using unique panel data from 2001-2020 of U.S. federal bureaucrats and congressional staff matched to lobbying records, we 1) provide important stylized facts on this phenomenon and 2) quantify the value to lobbying firms when their employees enter government service. Employing a matched difference-in-differences design appropriate for staggered treatment timing, we find a substantial increases in revenue to lobbying firms that gain government connections through departure of one of their lobbyists (36%, roughly $320,000 a year). Exploring the heterogeneity in this increase, we find larger premiums associated with lobbyists entering congressional offices (42\%) over government agencies (16%). Finally, we use a separate dataset accounting for monthly variation in the timing of the Trump administration’s appointment of lobbyists to agency positions, finding a large 36% increase in revenue for firms whose lobbyists were hired by the administration. These results shed light onto the political economy of the lobbying industry and the value of access in lobbying, and provide needed context surrounding policy debates on revolving door regulation.


“The Correlates of State Policy and the Structure of State Panel Data” with Matt Grossmann and Marty P. Jordan
2021, State Politics and Policy Quarterly
Abstract
The American states offer a wealth of variation across time and space to understand the sources, dynamics, and consequences of public policy. As laboratories of socio-economic and political differences, they enable both wide-scale assessments of change and studies of specific policy choices. To leverage this potential, we constructed and integrated a database of thousands of state-year variables for designing and executing social research: the Correlates of State Policy Project (CSPP). The database offers one-stop shopping for accurate and reliable data, allows researchers to assess the generalizability of the relationships they uncover, enables assessment of causal inferences, and connects state politics researchers to larger research communities. We demonstrate CSPP’s use and breadth, as well as its limitations. Through an applied empirical approach common to the state politics literature, we show that researchers should remain attentive to regional variation in key variables and potential lack of within-state variation in independent and dependent variables of interest. By comparing commonly used model specifications, we demonstrate that results are highly sensitive to particular research design choices. Inferences drawn from state politics research largely depend on the nature of over time variation within and across states and the empirical leverage it may or may not provide.


“Local News and National Politics” with Gregory Martin
2019, American Political Science Review
Winner of the 2019 Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper presented at MPSA.
Winner of the 2019 MPSA Best Paper in American Politics Award.
Abstract
The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to 1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, 2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage and 3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.


Selected Media Coverage:
“Bounding Partisan Approval Rates Under Endogenous Partisanship: Why Partisan Presidential Approval May be Higher than it Seems” with Zachary Peskowitz and Pablo Montagnes
2019, Journal of Politics
Abstract
The presidential approval rate among a president’s co-partisans has received a great deal of attention and is an important quantity for understanding accountability of the executive branch. Observed partisan approval rates may be biased when the composition of the president’s party changes. We show that the composition of the president’s party is endogenous to presidential popularity in Gallup polls, with the party growing and becoming more ideologically moderate as presidential popularity increases. We derive bounds on the compositionally-corrected partisan approval rate under a theoretically-motivated monotonicity condition. We examine how the bounds have evolved during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The proportion of survey respondents who identify with the Republican party has decreased rapidly from the pre-election benchmark during the Trump presidency and, as a result, the lower bound on Trump’s partisan approval rate is much lower than at a comparable point in the Obama presidency


Selected Media Coverage:
“Revolving Door Lobbyists and the Value of Congressional Staff Connections”
2018, Journal of Politics
Winner of the 2018 APSA Political Networks Section John Sprague Award for best paper presented by a graduate student in political networks during the previous year.
Abstract
Building on previous work on lobbying and relationships in Congress, I propose a theory of staff-to-staff connections as a human capital asset for Capitol Hill staff and revolving door lobbyists. Employing lobbying disclosure data matched to congressional staff employment histories, I find that the connections these lobbyists maintain to their former Hill coworkers primarily drive their higher relative value as lobbyists. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the number of connections predicts $360,000 in additional revenue during an ex-staffer’s first year as a lobbyist. I also find that the indirect connections lobbyists maintain to legislators through knowing a staffer in a legislative office are of potential greater value than a direct connection to a Senator given a large enough number of connections. This paper sheds additional light onto the political economy of the lobbying industry, making an important contribution to the literature on lobbying and the revolving door phenomenon.


Featured in a blog post at LegBranch.com: Cashing In On Connections: For Congressional Staff-Turned-Lobbyists, Who You Know Matters

External Grants

Policing Leadership and Accountability: Harnessing Big Data and Causal Inference for Evaluating Police Reform Practices
National Insitute of Justice (Principal Investigator), 2023. $972,083
Co-PIs: Ian Adams, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel Schiff
Abstract
This proposal outlines a comprehensive research plan to examine the impact of police executives on accountability mechanisms and outcomes within law enforcement. While there has been extensive research on the practices of frontline officers, the role of police executives in shaping and implementing these efforts has been largely overlooked. This proposal seeks to address this gap by conducting a systematic examination that starts at the highest level of command. The critical question the project will answer is: Do police chiefs and sheriffs impact accountability practices? And secondarily, are these policing elites themselves accountable? The interdisciplinary team has assembled a comprehensive dataset on U.S. police executives (2013-2018), capturing detailed information on every police chief and sheriff every six months during this period. To expand upon this work, the team seeks funding for collecting additional data beyond 2018 and exploring key agency factors and accountability mechanisms such as Civilian Review Boards (CRBs), AI accountability tools, public attitudes, protest data, and local policy proposals. Furthermore, the team will create the first-ever comprehensive database of CRBs. The study will then delve into how the composition of police executives influences accountability preferences and outcomes, including a thorough examination of the decision-making preferences of underrepresented executives and the effect of leadership changes on reforms. Analyses will be conducted on the adoption and effects of current accountability proposals, such as CRBs, body-worn cameras (BWCs), and AI systems used in identifying police misconduct, highlighting the vital role of police executives in driving these reforms. Modern causal research designs will be employed for the evaluations, and the results will be published in leading academic journals. Public datasets, statistical packages, and summary reports will also be released. Additionally, this project will launch the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) Lab to train a new generation of researchers in this field. The team consists of experts from various disciplines, including criminology, political science, public policy, technology, public administration, and policing practice. They have strong connections to police executives, technology vendors, media outlets, and policymaking circles, positioning the project to provide vital, actionable insights for policy and practice concerning police executives and accountability.


Representation, Responsiveness, and COVID-19
Russell Sage Foundation (Co-Principal Investigator), 2022. $138,832
Co-PIs: William Bianco, Rachel Blum
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone, but its effects varied dramatically by age, gender, race, ethnicity, and geography. The federal government provided massive funds for COVID relief and most of the aid was distributed to individuals and businesses based on general eligibility criteria. However, little is known about COVID relief distribution and its effects. Did federal aid reach communities most in need? And did the federal government respond effectively and equitably at a time of polarized political parties and massive cross-community economic and socio-economic differences? Political scientists William Bianco, Rachel Blum, and Joshua McCrain will assess the extent to which federal policy efforts affected existing socio-economic inequalities, using changes in the presidency and local representation after the 2020 elections and the differences between the Trump and Biden Administration assistance packages to test hypotheses about political favoritism. The first two COVID assistance packages (CARES Act, March 2020, and the Consolidated Appropriation Act, December 2020) were enacted when Trump and the senate majority were Republican, and the third (American Rescue Act, March 2021), when the federal government was under unified Democratic control. The investigators will first assess how funds from each program were distributed and the extent to which they varied across counties. Then, they will analyze variation in the extent to which individuals, groups, or regions received a disproportionate share of benefits. They hypothesize that political control affects the details of the proposals and post-enactment decisions about implementation.


Software

nicknameR: Easy name merging of common nicknames, R package, GitHub.

cspp: A Tool for the Correlates of State Policy Project Data, R package, CRAN. With Caleb Lucas
(github developmental version)


Working Papers
Drafts of all papers listed here are available upon request

“Campaign Contributions, Reciprocity, and Gender Solidarity” with Christian Fong and Cathy Wineinger (Invited to Revise and Resubmit, American Political Science Review)
Abstract
Women in Congress form tight-knit networks with one another. We show that these networks begin to take form even before women are elected. In interviews, women in Congress recognize that women face gender-based barriers in elections. Using a matching design, we show that female legislators help women candidates overcome these obstacles by donating to them at a higher rate than similar male legislators do. They give more in the earliest stages of the campaign and to non-incumbents. Donors follow up their money with other forms of assistance, such as serving as mentors and cosponsoring the recipient’s legislation. These results suggest that the gendered networks in Congress arise in part from reciprocal obligations women have to repay the women who helped them early in their careers.


“Arrested (Policy) Development: Explaining Change in Police Executives’ Support for Civilian Review Boards” with Ian Adams, Scott Mourtgos, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, and Daniel Schiff (Invited to Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management)
Abstract
Demand for democratic accountability in policing is growing across the United States, and Civilian Review Boards (CRBs), an external, citizen-comprised oversight tool, are an increasingly common policy response. Despite their support among the public, they are infrequently adopted by communities, likely due to resistance from police executives — specifically, police chiefs and sheriffs. This paper conducts a first-of-its-kind survey experiment to all law enforcement executives across the country, resulting in a sample of 10\% of the nation’s sheriffs and chiefs. We experimentally manipulate the information provided to executives about CRBs and then ask a) their degree of support for the boards, b) their willingness to establish such a board, and b) what they believe to be appropriate powers for them to hold. Our treatments include disclosing the degree of public support for CRBs, derived from a 15,000 person national survey we commissioned, and the diffusion of CRBs in other police agencies. Overall, we find that police executives can be moved to support some degree of civilian oversight, and that executives that already have CRBs are highly supportive of their existence. However, we find that sheriffs, who are elected, are much less likely to support CRBs than chiefs, consider establishing one, or grant them independent powers – even when confronted with the public support treatment. These results have important implications for policy discussions surrounding policing reform and suggest a puzzling relationship between the role of elections and civilian oversight in policing: unelected law enforcement leaders are more supportive of oversight than elected leaders.


“Partisanship, Expertise, or Connections? A Conjoint Survey Experiment on Lobbyist Hiring Decisions” with Benjamin C.K. Egerod, Hans Hassell, and David Miller (Invited to Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations)
Abstract
Lobbyists are important agents of organized interests. While prior studies have investigated the observed hiring patterns of interest groups, their findings may be confounded by the availability of lobbyists with certain characteristics. To assess the relative demand of interest groups for lobbyists with expertise, connections, and who share their preferences, we use a conjoint survey experiment to examine the hiring preferences for lobbyists. We find that organized interests prefer lobbyists with policy-specific expertise and the necessary connections to get access to decision-makers, but find little evidence that connections are more valuable than expertise. We also find that organized interests prefer lobbyists who share their political ideology, but that this preference diminishes when the hiring organization is not aligned ideologically with the party in unified control of government. Overall, our study paints a %less dire more nuanced picture of the role of preferences and connections in lobbying than many would expect.


“Command Voice: Changes in Police Executive Attitudes to Oversight Following Public and Peer Information” with Scott Mourtgos, Ian Adams, Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, and Kaylyn Schiff (Invited to Revise and Resubmit, Criminology and Public Policy)
Abstract
In a democratic society, the core policy beliefs of police executives critically shape the efficacy of civilian oversight mechanisms. This study investigates how information about public opinion and peer practices influences these executives’ views on Civilian Review Boards (CRBs). We applied structural topic modeling (STM) in an experimental paradigm, a novel approach diverging from traditional experimental survey methods, to the open-ended responses of 1,331 police executives, collected in an original survey experiment. This technique enables capturing nuanced shifts in beliefs directly from the executives’ narratives. The experiment systematically varied the information provided to police executives, including state-level public opinion data from a representative sample of 16,840 U.S. residents, and peer practices in major city police agencies. Our findings reveal that police executives, although generally aligned in their views, demonstrate a readiness to update their beliefs when presented with cohesive local public opinion and information about peer practices in policing. The findings underscore that police executives are able to update their core policy beliefs, and highlights the significance of informed decision-making in the evolving landscape of police governance, thereby offering valuable insights for policy adaptation and the advancement of effective civilian oversight in policing.


“A Tournament Theory of Congressional Leadership” with Christian Fong (Under Review)
Abstract
We apply tournament theory to congressional leadership to unify research on campaign finance with theories of endogenous party strength. Parties want to incentivize members to do costly work for the benefit of the party, such as fundraising. Accordingly, they make leadership offices attractive and award these leadership offices on the basis of who does the most work for the party. The more attractive the leadership office becomes, the harder party members work to win. We present a model to formalize this argument, derive its empirical implications, and find support for these implications using data from committee assignments, committee authorizations, and fundraising for leadership political action committees and congressional hill committees.


“Lobbying Against Discrimination: The Effects of Race and Gender in Lobbyist Hiring Decisions” with Benjamin C.K. Egerod, Hans Hassell, and David Miller (Under Review)
Abstract
Public lobbying disclosure reports indicate a decreasing racial and gender gap among lobbyists in recent years, but women and minorities are still (substantially) underrepresented among federal lobbyists. These gender and racial differences are also greater among conservative leaning groups. What drives these trends? Although previous work has highlighted the relative scarcity of women and minorities in positions leading to lobbyist positions, we know less about whether interest groups are interested in hiring qualified women and minorities for such positions. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey of individuals involved in hiring lobbyists to examine the demand for women and minority lobbyists, we find greater demand for female and minority lobbyists than for their male and white counterparts, especially among ideological liberals. Overall, our work shows that the lobbying industry does not appear to discount the candidacies potential female and minority lobbyists.


“Media Consolidation” with Gregory Martin, Nicola Mastrorocco, and Adrianna Ornaghi
Abstract
Recent decades have seen major disruptions to the local media environment in the United States. The changing economics in local news media has resulted in the purchase of many previously independent local newspaper and television outlets by conglomerates as well as the consolidation of existing ownership groups. The economic incentives of media conglomerates leads to cutting costs through the nationalization of news and disinvestment in local reporting, with implications for voters’ ability to obtain information about local politics. We examine the political implications of media ownership consolidation, exploiting the purchase of media outlets by conglomerate owners. Using local elections and political participation data, we show an increase in incumbency advantage, decreases in election competitiveness, and decrease in the rate of contested elections associated with the acquisition of a local media outlet by a conglomerate owner. These results hold important implications for the ability of voters to hold elected officials accountable and how this relates to the regulation of media ownership.


“Legislative Resources, Staff, and Inequality in Representation” (Submitted)
Winner of the 2019 APSA Class and Inequality Section Best Poster on Economic Inequality Award.
Abstract
Members of Congress are provided substantial resources for the task of representing their districts. A common trade-off legislators make in the use of their resources is between constituency service and policy representation, with certain populations and district traits determining the nature of this allocation choice. This paper focuses on legislative staff as an important legislative resource. Staff, tasked with fulfilling the responsibilities of an office in each of these spheres of representation, are the mechanism through which offices respond to constituent preferences. Using comprehensive congressional staff employment data and an original data set of congressional disbursements, I show that offices that allocate their staff resources more towards policy representation relative to constituency service disproportionately come from electorally safe, wealthy, and urban districts. I then demonstrate these investment choices largely remain constant within districts, suggesting district traits, such as electoral competition or demographics, drive these decisions. The consequences of these patterns hold important implications for collective representation, whether citizens’ policy preferences are equally represented, and the formation of policy agendas within Congress.


“Human Capital on Capitol Hill”
Abstract
There are roughly 10,000 individuals working as personal staffers for members of the U.S. House of Representatives in a given year. These professional staffers are tasked with fulfilling the roles of policymaking, constituency service, and representation more broadly. Except for the well-known revolving door between Capitol Hill and lobbying, little is understood about the labor market for staff. Staff seek to use their time on Capitol Hill as underpaid and overworked public servants to bolster their prospects for future employment. Legislators, solely responsible for the hiring and retainment of their staff, are confronted with this labor market when using their resources. I argue that legislator and district characteristics, such as competitiveness and focus on policymaking, shape the desirability of offices as targets of employment and, as a result, the human capital of legislative offices. I find that competitive districts possess 28% less experienced staff and suffer from worse staff retention. Additionally, offices and districts that do not invest in policymaking see fewer staff selecting into their offices and have lower rates of human capital among their staff. On average, staff with higher human capital select into offices that offer more career-advancing opportunities. The implications for these results suggest some districts are systematically disadvantaged in the staffing labor market, with important implications for representation and congressional reformers.


“The Gender Pay Gap in Congressional Offices” (Submitted) with Maxwell Palmer
Abstract
A growing literature examines the behavioral differences between men and women as candidates and elected officials, especially in Congress. However, little existing work has systematically analyzed how gender differences translate to the staffers members of Congress hire once in office. This is a notable gap given the importance extant research has assigned to congressional staff and their ability to influence the political process. In this paper, we analyze the gender dynamics of congressional staffing in the House and Senate. Using a comprehensive dataset of congressional staff employment histories from 2000-2014 which includes salary information, we find significant differences in the ways in which members pay their staff of different genders. We also find that large fluctuations in these trends over time conditional on the party and gender of the member of Congress. Overall, we find evidence of a large gender pay gap in certain offices, but there is substantial heterogeneity in the size of this gap depending on party and the seniority of the congressional staffer.


Media Coverage:

Writing in Popular Media

Research Prepared for Congressional Committees

  • Policy Memo on Congressional Staff Salaries in the House and Senate
    • Prepared for Select Committee on Modernization of Congress