Once in office, politicians propose policies aimed at maintaining the
support of their constituencies. This form of political activism
increases with polity size – i.e., the number of politicians in
government – but it may clash with capacity constraints, leading to a
congestion effect whereby politicians’ plans are not enacted in
practice. With novel data on Italian municipalities, we estimate the
causal effect of polity size on a battery of planned and actual budget
outcomes. We leverage a reform that introduced a new temporary
population threshold where polity size changed discontinuously and
estimate local treatment effects with a difference-in-discontinuities
design. We document a congestion effect. Municipalities with larger
polities have a larger planned budget which does not translate
into a larger actual budget. The congestion effect decreases
when bureaucratic capacity is high, proving how administrative capacity
can be a binding constraint for politicians’ behavior.
A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality
of Bureaucracy
We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the
quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative
democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy
commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power,
populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of
financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their
policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling
resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000
Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the
effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression
discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor
leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement
contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats –
driven by forced rather than voluntary departures – and a sharp decrease
in the percentage of graduate bureaucrats.
A Dynamic Measure of Bureaucratic Reputation: New Data for New Theory
2022, American Journal of Political Science
Bureaucratic reputation is one of the most important concepts used to
understand the behaviour of administrative agencies and their
interactions with multiple audiences. Despite a rich theoretical
literature discussing reputation, we do not have a comparable measure
across agencies, between countries, and over time. I present a new
strategy to measure bureaucratic reputation from legislative speeches
with word-embedding techniques. I introduce an original dataset on the
reputation of 465 bureaucratic bodies over a period of forty years, and
across two countries, the US and the UK. I perform several validation
tests and present an application of this method to investigate whether
partisanship and agency politicisation matter for reputation. I find
that agencies enjoy a better reputation among the members of the party
in government, with partisan differences less pronounced for independent
bodies. I finally discuss how this measurement strategy can contribute
to classical and new questions about political-administrative
interactions.
Under Review
The Executive Unbound? Politicized Bureaucracy and Partisan Procurement
under DOGE
The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
during Trump’s second term marks an expansion of presidential authority
over federal agencies. This institutional development provides a rare
opportunity to examine whether presidents can leverage politicized
agencies for political and electoral goals. Drawing on detailed
procurement data and DOGE’s cancellation records, we find that
Republican donor firms were less likely to face cancellations, whereas
firms donating to Democrats were more likely to lose contracts.
Cancellations were less frequent in Republican-held districts,
conservative agencies, and states favorable to the Republican Party.
Leveraging the timing of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we
use a difference-in-differences design to show that Wisconsin-based
firms experienced a sharp increase in cancellations following the
election, underscoring the strategic timing of DOGE’s operations. Our
findings shed new light on the consequences of agency politicization and
align with the Trump administration’s effort to consolidate its support
base.
The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism: Theory and Evidence
We present a theory of populism centered on commitment politics – a type
of agency relationship in which candidates promise specific and
monitorable policies. The shift to commitment politics is driven by
increased distrust toward government institutions, itself a consequence
of cognitive complexity and disinformation typical of modern social
media environments. Candidates who adopt a commitment platform
rationally choose all the complementary strategies associated with
populism, including anti-elite rhetoric, misinformation, aversion to
judicial independence, and bureaucratic expertise. The paper presents
observational and experimental evidence from the United States on the
supply and demand of commitment consistent with the model’s key
predictions.
Group Appeals and Political Mobilization: Evidence from U.S. House Races
Group membership plays a crucial role in political conflict, with
candidates frequently using group appeals to mobilize voters. However,
the factors influencing candidates’ decisions to employ such appeals
remain insufficiently understood. We propose an argument rooted in the
notion that candidates selectively deploy group appeals to maximize
electoral returns and we introduce a novel method for detecting group
appeals in text, which is applied to the universe of tweets posted by
U.S. House candidates between 2012-2021. We present three findings.
First, candidates’ group membership and their district’s demographic
composition are strongly associated with the frequency of group appeals.
Second, protest events associated with specific groups increase appeals
to those groups. Third, except for young voters, there is limited
evidence that these appeals enhance turnout intentions. These findings
offer new insights into how politicians strategically engage
underrepresented groups in the electorate, contributing to our
understanding of identity-based political mobilization.
Working Papers
Bureaucratic Information in Congress
Bureaucratic agencies produce a wealth of information that can be used
by politicians when making policies. However, little is known about the
extent to which members of Congress rely on bureaucratic information and
what factors they consider when they do so. I introduce a novel measure
of politicians’ reliance on bureaucratic information which uses natural
language processing to extract and analyze bureaucratic information used
by members of Congress in congressional speeches, newsletters, and
social media. I find that members make greater use of information coming
from ideologically similar bureaucracies, especially in floor speeches
and during legislative hearings. Leveraging the Supreme Court’s decision
in Seila Law vs. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – which curtailed
the independence of the CFPB – as a shock to the independence to the
bureau, I find that members’ reliance on the information produced by the
CFPB drops as a result of the court’s decision to. Statutory features
insulating agencies from political control sharply increase members’
reliance on bureaucratic information. These findings have implications
for theories of separation of powers and for the use of evidence in
policy-making.
Personnel is Policy: Delegation and Political Misalignment in the
Rulemaking Process
Combining data on the U.S. federal rulemaking process with personnel and
voter registration records, we study the consequences of political
misalignment between regulators and the President. We show four main
results. First, there are only small partisan cycles in the assignment
of rules to regulators, and subject-matter expertise matters much more
than partisan alignment in the assignment process. Second, rules
overseen by misaligned regulators take systematically longer to
complete. Third, misaligned regulators produce rules that have lower
readability, are more likely to attract public opposition and to be
challenged in court. Fourth, political leaders face a trade-off between
alignment and expertise: we estimate that assigning rules only to
aligned regulators would have lost 36% of the stock of expertise in the
U.S. rulemaking process between 1997 and 2023.
Work in Progress
Campaign Contributions and Self-Reports: How Accurate Are Survey
Responses Regarding Donation Behavior?
Measures of whether an individual is a political donor commonly depend
on self-reports from surveys. In the United States, the discrepancy
between the percentage of self-reported donors and validated ones with
the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has often been over 20 percentage
points. Because “small donors” who give no more than $200 do not need to
be reported to the FEC, it is unclear whether this discrepancy is due to
overreporting, such as is prevalent for voting turnout. To investigate
this issue, we conducted an original survey for which we had information
on whether an individual is a validated FEC donor. The survey–which
includes samples of the general population, affluent, and
donors–includes questions on whether the respondent has given above the
legal reporting threshold and whether they have ever donated.
Additionally, we conducted an original list experiment to assess whether
self-reported donating rates decline once the respondent’s answer is not
identified individually in the survey response. The results suggest that
overreporting is high for survey items that ask about the activity
without reference to the amount, but drops substantially once
respondents are asked whether they gave above the the legal threshold.
More specifically, the list experiment suggests that only 3 percent of
respondents donate even though it is common for over 20 percent of
respondents to state that they donated in individual survey items. At
the same time, the data on validated donors show that once respondents
are asked whether they gave above the legal threshold, the rate of
overreporting drops to only 5 percentage points.
The anti-Democrat Penalty: The Political Consequences of Regulatory
Enforcement in the United States
A large literature explores the political drivers of regulatory
enforcement and firm responses, but little is known about how employees’
political behavior changes when their employer is sanctioned. This paper
investigates how enforcement actions by the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) affect the political mobilization and partisan leaning of
employees. Using a novel dataset linking firm-level enforcement data to
individual employment records and historical voter files, I track over
14 million individuals across 150,000 regulated firms.
Difference-in-differences estimates show that employees at sanctioned
firms are less likely to register to vote and register as Democrats.
Analysis of 411 million online reviews reveals employees do not blame
the firm after the EPA penalty, suggesting the absence of anti-business
attitudes as a result. This project highlights how bureaucratic
enforcement can shape political behavior, offering new insights into the
electoral consequences of regulatory governance.
Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Multiple Principals: Evidence from
High-Frequency Social Media Data
We examine federal agencies’ responsiveness to multiple principals,
focusing on the President, House Appropriations Committee members, and
oversight committees. Utilizing a novel dataset of 2.17 million tweets
from 94 agencies posted between 2010 and 2022, matched with 2.5 million
tweets from members of Congress and presidents, we employ stance
detection methods to classify tweets mentioning agencies as supportive,
opposing, or neutral. Our findings reveal that agencies are highly
responsive to supportive mentions, particularly from the President,
resulting in a significant increase in Twitter activity. Conversely,
agencies are less responsive to criticism. Using an event-study design,
we show that when criticized by the President, agencies shift their
focus to policy issues, indicating a reputation-maximizing strategy.
This study underscores the unique role of social media in modern
bureaucratic politics, where real-time signals from political principals
significantly influence agency behavior and communication strategies.
A New Language-Based Measure of Bureaucratic Ideology
Classical models of American political institutions–spanning delegation,
oversight, and information transmission–hinge on the ideological
distance between the bureaucracy, presidents, and members of Congress.
While ideology is well measured for presidents and legislators,
comparable, time-varying measures for the bureaucracy remain scarce.
This paper develops a dynamic, language-based measure of bureaucratic
ideology, inferred from how members of Congress (MCs) discuss federal
agencies. Using 8.5 million congressional speeches (1979–2022)
mentioning hundreds of agencies, I apply natural language inference
models to classify whether MCs express support, opposition, or
neutrality toward each agency. These stances, combined with MCs’
DW-NOMINATE scores, produce time-variant estimates of agency ideology
across administrations. Validation against expert assessments and prior
metrics shows strong alignment. Applying the measure to congressional
oversight, I find that greater ideological distance between MCs and
agencies predicts more intensive questioning of bureaucratic witnesses.
This scalable, low-cost approach enables new analyses of
political–bureaucratic relations over time.