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State and local governments put hundreds of referendums on the ballot each year. Often, they pass but sometimes they fail. What happens after a successful or failed attempt at the ballot box? Do advocates go back to voters with another request? And if they do, do they tend to succeed? We employ a regression discontinuity empirical framework to causally estimate referendum dynamics in the arena of land conservation. Our results suggest municipalities where a referendum just barely fails hold about 0.5 more referendums and pass about 0.28 more referendums than municipalities that just barely pass, meaning initial defeat is often reversed. We also investigate whether strategic changes are made in election approaches for those that try again. We find no evidence of systematic patterns in strategic revisions for municipalities that fail their first referendum. However, when revisions are made, our evidence suggests that voters appear to respond positively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past two decades, the presidency and both houses of Congress have been hotly contested by the two major political parties. Yet, geographically, the United States seems to be increasingly marked by "red" areas where the Democratic Party lacks any ability to even dream of winning office and "blue" areas where the Republican Party lacks enough electoral support to produce viable candidates. There are two possible reasons America is more politically segregated than in the past. The first reason, argued by Bill Bishop (2008) in his book "The Big Sort," is that increasingly, people are choosing their neighborhoods based on criteria that correlate highly with political preferences. This argument suggests that political segregation is a product of the movement of voters between neighborhoods; as kids grow up and move out of their parents' homes, or people move from one home to another, they are choosing neighborhoods that contain more co-partisans. However, there is another possible reason for a more politically segregated America. The United States went through what political scientists call a "political realignment" in the lead-up to and following the Civil Rights Act that rocked what it meant, ideologically, to be a "Democrat" or a "Republican" (e.g., Schickler 2016). From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, journalists (e.g., Broder 1972) and academics (e.g., Wattenberg 1998) alike bemoaned the apparent meaninglessness of the two political parties. Using these two theories as a motivating force, the authors set out to examine the extent to which the United States has become more politically segregated and to see whether they could isolate which factors have contributed to this sorting.

AbstractLand trusts in the U.S. play an important role in preventing the loss of farmland to development. Farmers seeking affordable land may benefit from these conservation efforts. Yet the distribution of these benefits across farmer groups is unclear. This study asks: To what extent are land trusts meeting the needs of farmers and gardeners from marginalized backgrounds? Interviews with land trust staff and focus groups with marginalized farmers and gardeners in New England, USA reveal discrepancies in how diversity and land access are discussed. Access to adequate, affordable land was a serious concern among farmers and gardeners, yet few land trusts had programs to increase access for diverse populations. Land trusts approached diversity, equity, and inclusion work by making limited commitments, pivoting to social class, and avoidance due to perceptions of mission drift. These findings have significant implications for who benefits and who is excluded from private farmland conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates voter decision-making on two smart-growth components: land preservation and affordable housing. We seek to understand how voters make concurrent decisions about unpaired smart-growth components at the ballot box. Previous studies of smart growth, affordable housing, and environmental preservation have focused primarily on describing the attitudes and traits of voters on these policies, utilize aggregate voting outcomes, or are case studies of single towns in which there is a fairly homogenous group of residents either supporting or opposing the policy. We draw on a unique data set to investigate the different covariates of attitudes for environmental preservation and affordable housing: an exit poll of voters in the 2016 Rhode Island General Election on bond referendums for environmental preservation and affordable housing. We find that the coalition for smart growth that includes both land preservation and affordable housing is undermined by views of minorities and the poor as undeserving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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