What are the long-term effects of community-level destruction? We use historical aerial imagery of the aftermath of the United States' indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo during World War II to generate detailed new data on conditionally independent variation in neighborhood-level damages from...

I review the main theoretical arguments and empirical evidence of the relationship between electoral rules and turnout, as well as the puzzles that have emerged from that literature. I then highlight some recent theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancements using subnational data that...

Scholars of voting behavior are often confronted with poor data availability or unsuitably large units of aggregation for reported turnout. We demonstrate a big-data solution to this challenge, using fine-grained cell-phone mobility data on millions of GPS locations for more than 300,000...

Closed-list proportional representation (PR) generates higher average levels of descriptive representation for women. But because parties control candidate promotion, often based on seniority rules, gender bias in the seniority system can potentially curtail women’s career advancement. We...

Samuels and Snyder (BJPS, 2001) presented the index of malapportionment (i.e., the discrepancy between seat shares and population shares by electoral districts) in national legislatures for seventy eight countries. This short research note uses their index and the Gini index, a commonly used...

Does voter turnout affect policy outcomes? This long-standing question has been re-visited recently with close empirical scrutiny. These studies, however, commonly suffer from a problem of omitting variables correlated with both causal and outcome variables; specifically, immeasurable political...

Why do politicians serve on the boards of private firms, and why do firms bring politicians onto their boards? We examine this question of "politically connected firms" by drawing on a new dataset of "moonlighting" activities by Japanese politicians. Specifically, we focus on incumbents who were...