Proposition 13 and successive state constitutional limitations on property taxes put California cities in a fiscal bind. Cities responded by making developers pay “up front” for the cost of infrastructure and other public services. Impact fees, affordable-housing mandates and ad-hoc...

Political scientists commonly attribute the underproduction of housing in US metropolitan areas to unequal participation and collective action problems. Homeowners, who are organized, repeat players in local politics, mobilize against proposed projects nearby, while renters, who would benefit...

It is common to think of political elites—candidates, legislators, party officials, and campaign advisers—as specialists in learning the preferences of voters. But recent studies find that political elites believe public opinion within legislative districts to be more conservative than it...

This Article responds to Professor Rick Hasen’s important new work, The Democracy Canon. Hasen identifies an intriguing and until now largely unnoticed practice in many state courts-to wit, the construing of election statutes with a strong thumb-on-the-scales in favor of easing voters’...

For decades, legal attacks on partisan gerrymanders have foundered on a manageability dilemma: doctrinal standards the Supreme Court has regarded as judicially discoverable have been rejected as unmanageable, whereas the more manageable standards on offer have been dismissed as insufficiently...

This study exploits the introduction of a new type of public financing of elections|campaign finance vouchers|to estimate the effects of neighborhood-level political cross pressure on citizens' decisions to participate in low-cost political activities which vary in their publicness: voting...

This white paper proposes a new tool — the development-rights auction — for inducing local governments to comply with state policies favoring high-density housing near transit and job centers. Local governments that rezone pursuant to state law would be permitted to auction, and thus profit...

Conserving ecological resources on private lands appears to require both (a) supportive landowners, and (b) regulatory coercion, notwithstanding, (c) that rural landowners comprise the most consistently antienvironmental demographic group in America. Neither policymakers nor legal scholars have...

This Article examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and to hold elected officials accountable for the government's performance. Drawing on a half-century of research by political scientists, we argue that political...

Voters face difficult choices in low-information local elections. Despite the concerns this raises for voter competence, there are virtually no studies of whether and when voters are able to choose candidates who best represent them ideologically in these contexts. We fill this gap by creating...