Why taking an anti-immigration policy position is a poor long-term electoral strategy.

With Donald Trump’s stated desire to build a wall on the Mexican border and to prevent Muslims from entering the US, immigration is at the forefront of the 2016 presidential election. In new research which uses Texas and California’s 1994 gubernatorial election as case studies, Austin Doctor and Jamie Monogan examine the long-term effects of parties’ immigration platforms on their electoral chances. They find that while parties which push extreme immigration policy positions may do well electorally in the short run, over the long-term they may lose support to the other party

Patterns in the politics of drugs and tobacco: The Supreme Court and issue attention by policymakers and the press

Past research has demonstrated lasting effects of important Supreme Court decisions on issue attention in the national media. In this light, the Court has served as an important agenda setter. We significantly expand on these findings by arguing that these salient Court decisions can raise the perceived importance of political issues and induce heightened, short-term policy attention in the broader political system. Using measures of media attention, congressional policy actions, and presidential policy actions, we utilize dynamic vector autoregressive modelling to examine the Court’s impact on issue attention in the macro policy system regarding tobacco and drug policy. Overall, this study suggests that the Supreme Court’s most important decisions might significantly affect broader issue attention in the American political system

The Ballpark podcast Episode 2.2: do state governments even matter?

This episode, we’re looking into an often overlooked level of American policy-making: state governments. While the federal government is gripped by gridlock, the states surprisingly continue to pump out public policy. What makes these smaller governments work so efficiently? And do these laboratories of democracy really work for everyone

How states make their own air pollution somebody else’s problem

For now, one of the unfortunate byproducts of an industrial economy is air pollution, but states can often reap the benefits of industry and production while forcing other states to bear the costs. In a new study of tens of thousands of air polluters in the US, James E. Monogan III, David M. Konisky, and Neal D. Woods find that air polluters are more likely to be located near a downwind border compared to solid waste polluters; in effect, making air pollution another state’s problem

If the next president wants to put an ideologue on the Supreme Court, they will have to sacrifice their initial domestic policy goals.

One of the first tasks for the new president this January – whoever they may be – could be to nominate a new justice to the Supreme Court. But how should the next president go about this? In new research, Anthony J. Madonna, James E. Monogan III, and Richard L. Vining, Jr. find that the more a president supports a particular Supreme Court nominee, the lower the chance that they can get a major new policy initiative through the Senate. If the new president wishes to focus on achieving their policy goals in their first 150 days, they argue, they should compromise by appointing a moderate to the Supreme Court, rather than an ideologue

Filling Potholes in Pell’s Road to Reentry Success

Pell eligibility for incarcerated people is a great rehabilitative opportunity, but several challenges remain. This article recaps five of the issues identified by the original research articles in this special issue. It also considers how solutions proposed in these studies may be beneficial across a variety of these issues and gathers recommendations together by which actor could implement them. Problems and solutions are corroborated by the author’s personal experience with incarceration

The Long-Term Consequences of Immigration Politics

This dissertation studies the politics of immigration in the United States over the past two decades and presents three findings. First, it expands upon formal research on elections by considering competition in a dynamic environment of multiple elections. It shows that political parties generally will take an issue position closer to present electoral ideology, but they will move towards a position that may win in the future the more highly they value winning in the future and the less uncertain they are about election outcomes. Second, it asks what shaped immigration policy in the fifty states between 2005 and 2008 and shows that policy is affected primarily by electoral ideology, but also by legislative professionalism and state wealth. Surprisingly, party control of state offices has no effect on immigration policy beyond the consequences of ideology. Third, the dissertation demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California, Texas, and the United States as a whole moved after the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Change point analyses of these data indicate that Wilson harmed the Republican coalition in California and the nation, while Bush helped the Texas Republican party. Further, Bush's presidency undid much of the harm Wilson brought on the Republican party among Hispanics

The Construction of Interest Communities: Distinguishing Bottom-Up and Top-Down Models

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State Immigration Policies: The Role of State Compacts and Interest Groups on Immigration Legislation

US states are active in enacting immigration policies, which vary widely and have substantial impact on the lives of immigrants. Our understanding of what produces these divergent state laws remains limited. Qualitative research demonstrates the importance of a 2010 immigration compact, supported by a powerful religious organization, in shaping immigration policies in Utah, and the Utah Compact was held up as a model for other states. But is the experience of Utah applicable across other states? We test the effects of compacts and interest groups on immigration policy adoption across all 50 states between 2005 and 2013. Our findings suggest that compacts are actually associated with more restrictive immigration policy. Although states with compacts are more likely to pass inclusive immigration laws, these are counterbalanced by higher numbers of exclusive laws. Both religious and non‐religious interests groups are associated with policy, but they do not explain the effects of compacts

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the U.S., along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this paper, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native- and foreign-born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post-PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native-foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional upon the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states