CAREER: Political Institutions and the Distribution of Public Resources

45年前，试图行使投票权的黑人可能会遭遇暴力。今天，一位黑人成为了总统。四十年来，黑人在各级民选机构的政治代表性方面取得了很大进步。虽然不同种族代表的投票记录被反复研究，但几乎没有证据表明黑人代表的增加是否会导致公共资源越来越多地流向黑人社区。更普遍的是，缺乏关于政治制度如何影响公共产品在社区间分配的严谨研究。本研究项目由三项研究组成，旨在解决文献中的这一漏洞，并开始通过跨学科的本科课程和利益相关者的政策简报，在通常的学术渠道之外传播研究结果。这三个项目的学术价值来自于它们与政治经济学文献的联系。它们从对公共政策的影响中获得更广泛的影响。第一个项目旨在描述公共资源随时间在社区间的分布模式。通过收集费城40年来游泳池、消防站和其他公共物品的详细数据，本研究将为以下问题提供第一个描述性证据：1)随着时间的推移，相同的社区是否会继续“赢得”更大份额的政治资源？ 2)不同种族组成的社区之间的物品分配如何随着当选官员种族的不同而变化？第二个项目利用了1982年《投票权法案》的修正案，该修正案从外部增加了国会中黑人的数量，以确定代表性种族与跨社区资源分配之间是否存在因果关系。这项工作将讨论身份如何塑造政治行为的文献，使用一个可以说比以前的工作更重要、更切实的结果。这项工作也与如何为联邦和州立法机构划分选区的十年一次的讨论有关。最后的项目也将为重新划分选区的辩论提供信息。虽然国会选区必须包含大致相同数量的美国居民，但它们的设计并不是为了平衡合格选民的数量。当涉及到没有投票权的被监禁人口时，这种区别尤为重要。虽然这些无投票权的囚犯大多数是黑人，来自城市地区，但大多数监狱越来越多地设在以白人为主的农村县。因此，如果我们考虑代表与合格选民的比例，这些以农村为主的监狱县相对于普通县的代表性过高。在此背景下，最后的研究测试了理论假设，即随着选民与代表的比例上升，代表为该地区带来的资源下降。将这些发现整合到首席研究员的公共财政和政治经济学课程中，将产生更广泛的影响。此外，这些经济学和政治学交叉的研究将构成伦理学、政治学和经济学新本科课程的基础，这是一门跨学科专业，首席研究员担任顾问委员会成员。由于不仅要教育未来的领导人，而且要教育今天作出重新划分决定的人，这一点很重要，首席研究员将进一步利用她的新闻培训编写政策简报，以便向利益攸关方传播。

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.