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While the economic implications of housing have been examined extensively, surprisingly limited attention has been devoted to how the housing market impacts politics. My dissertation is a three paper compilation that addresses the relationship between housing and politics. Taken together, this dissertation traces through the ways in which housing plays a role in American political life, from preference formation to concrete participatory outcomes such as voting and writing to legislators. In my first paper, Unemployment Shocks, Housing Wealth and Political Preferences, I demonstrate that housing has micro-economic implications for the way people smooth over income shocks. I find that people in counties which experience an unexpected unemployment shock finance that shock using mortgage loans, and that there is a life-cycle aspect to such financing. I also find that people perceive social insurance and home equity as substitutes, but only when access to home equity is relatively high. My second paper, Lending Support: Agency MBS Issuance and Rewarding Incumbents, examines how a shock to housing wealth affects electoral outcomes. I demonstrate that after experiencing a large increase in mortgage credit post-2000, low-income counties were more likely to support their incumbents. This effect principally pertains to Democratic incumbents, who were particularly vocal in advocating for the maintenance of these loosened credit conditions, and used these conditions to claim credit for providing access to housing in poorer counties. Finally, my third paper, Local Economic Information, Foreclosure and Political Attitudes, delves into the cognitive role that housing plays in making individual political behavioral decisions. I find that reading about or seeing a photo of a foreclosed house makes respondents more likely to send a strongly worded letter to their Member of Congress, whereas seeing a photo of a foreclosed house is about twice as likely to make respondents express interest in engaging with their local community. I also find that seeing a photo of a foreclosure and reading about foreclosures serve as almost perfect substitutes., Government

Millions of people in the US have direct experience with the machinery of immigration enforcement or criminal courts, and millions more have seen family members, friends, or neighbors face these experiences. What do these experiences mean for political behavior in the United States? Do these proximate observers decide that government is a dangerous and capricious force to be avoided, and withdraw from political participation entirely? Or is there sometimes a mobilization response, where some people organize to push back against what they see as unjust government actions? This is an important policy feedback story. Large-scale punitive policies could either "lock themselves in" via community disengagement, or hasten their own demise by fueling political responses. The three papers of this dissertation examine policies at varying distances (people living in an area where the policy is introduced, those directly affected, and those living with people directly affected), and with different timeframes and geographic coverage. The results of these papers, and the approach of using administrative datasets and finding causal leverage from "natural experiments," point us toward a new understanding of policy feedbacks. In the first paper, I find that Latino voters living in counties where a new deportation program was introduced before the 2010 election became more likely to vote. This effect seems driven not by personal experience seeing deportation activities, but by activists mobilizing voters in affected counties. In the second paper, I use random courtroom assignment to measure the causal effect of short jail sentences (from misdemeanor cases) on voting. I find that even short jail sentences can deter people from voting in the next election, with particularly large effects among black voters. In the third paper, I find that the household members of incarcerated people also become several percentage points less likely to vote. This finding is particularly striking given the narrow scope of the effect measured: this is only the additional effect of seeing a household member jailed for a short period, among a set of people that have already seen their household member arrested and charged with a crime., Government

Citizens regularly encounter social contexts that have important consequences for political behavior. This dissertation evaluates the political influence of two such environments: religious institutions and ethno-racial neighborhood contexts.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has expanded to over 1,500 municipalities worldwide since its inception in Porto Alege, Brazil in 1989 by the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party). While PB has been adopted throughout the world, it has yet to take hold in the United States. This dissertation examines the introduction of PB to the United States with the first project in Chicago in 2009, and proceeds with an in-depth case study of the largest implementation of PB in the United States: Participatory Budgeting in New York City. I assess the outputs of PB in the United States including deliberations, governance, and participation. I argue that PB produces better outcomes than the status quo budget process in New York City, while also transforming how those who participate understand themselves as citizens, constituents, Council members, civil society leaders and community stakeholders. However, there are serious challenges to participation, including high costs of engagement, process exhaustion, and perils of scalability. I devise a framework for assessment called “citizenly politics,” focusing on: 1) designing participation 2) deliberation 3) participation and 4) potential for institutionalization. I argue that while the material results PB produces are relatively modest, including more innovative projects, PB delivers more substantial non-material or existential results. Existential citizenly rewards include: greater civic knowledge, strengthened relationships with elected officials, and greater community inclusion. Overall, PB provides a viable and informative democratic innovation for strengthening civic engagement within the United States that can be streamlined and adopted to scale., Government