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In this thesis, I empirically assess the dynamics of political behavior. More specifically, I analyze what creates — or does not create — change in political participation, such as voting in elections and contributing to campaigns. Through this, I intend to show that paying close attention to dynamics can help answer fundamental questions of political behavior and offer important insights for real-life policies. In Chapter 1, I focus on how non-political life events and election administration policy impact voter turnout. I analyze (1) the effect of moving on turnout over time and (2) how an election administration policy helps with the recovery of lowered turnout by lowering the re-registration burden of movers. Moving depresses turnout by imposing various costs on voters. However, movers eventually settle down, and such detrimental effects can disappear over time. I analyze these dynamics using United States Postal Services (USPS) data and detailed voter panel data from Orange County, California. Using a generalized additive model, I show that previously registered voters who move close to the election are significantly less likely to vote (at most -16.2 percentage points), and it takes at least six months on average for turnout to recover. This dip-and-recovery is not observed for within-precinct moves, suggesting that costs of moving matter only when the voter's environment has changed much. I then evaluate an election administration policy that resolves their re-registration burden. This policy proactively tracks movers, updates their registration records for them, and notifies them by mailings. Using a natural experiment, I find that this policy is effective in boosting turnout (+5.9 percentage points). This success of a simple, pre-existing, and non-partisan safety net is promising, and I conclude by discussing policy implications. Chapter 2 (published at Election Law Journal, doi: 10.1089/elj.2019.0593, coauthored with R. Micha

Inferences about individual campaign contributors are limited by how the Federal Election Commission collects and reports data. Only transactions that exceed a cycle-to-date total of $200 are individually disclosed, so that contributions of many donors are unobserved. We contrast visible and "hidden" donors, i.e., small donors who are invisible due to censoring—and routinely ignored in existing research. We use the Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, whose unique campaign structure received money only through an intermediary/conduit committee. These are governed by stricter disclosure statutes, allowing us to study donors who are normally hidden. For Sanders, there were seven hidden donors for every visible donor, and altogether, hidden donors were responsible for 33.8% of Sanders' campaign funds. We show that hidden donors start giving relatively later, with contributions concentrated around early primaries. We suggest that as presidential campaign strategies change towards wooing smaller donors, more research on what motivates them is necessary.