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 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.
Work in Progress
Campaign Contributions and Self-Reports: How Accurate Are Survey
Responses Regarding Donation Behavior?
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.