Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading localities to block housing. This paper offers another explanation: ordinary people simply do not believe that adding more housing to the regional stock would reduce housing prices. Across three original surveys of urban and suburban residents, only a minority of respondents say that a large, positive, regional housing supply shock would reduce prices or rents. These beliefs are weakly held and unstable (suggesting people have given the issue little thought), but respondents do have stable views about who is to blame for high housing prices: developers and landlords. Large, bipartisan supermajorities support price controls, demand subsidies, and restrictions on putative bad actors, policies which they believe would be more effective than supply liberalization for widespread affordability. We discuss the implications of these findings for efforts to expand the supply of housing.

Until the Supreme Court put an end to it in Shelby County v. Holder, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was widely regarded as an effective, low-cost tool for blocking potentially discriminatory changes to election laws and administrative practices. The provision the Supreme Court left standing, section 2, is generally seen as expensive, cumbersome, and almost wholly ineffective at blocking changes before they take effect This Article argues that the courts, in partnership with the Department of Justice, could reform section 2 so that it fills much of the gap left by the Supreme Courts evisceration of section 5. The proposed reformation of section 2 rests on two insights: first, that national survey data often contains as much or more information than precinct-level vote margins about the core factual matters in section 2 cases; and second, that the courts have authority to regularize section 2 adjudication by creating rebuttable presumptions. Most section 2 cases currently turn on costly, case-specific estimates of voter preferences generated from precinct-level vote totals and demographic information. Judicial decisions provide little guidance about how future cases—each relying on data from a different set of elections—are likely to be resolved. By creating evidentiary presumptions whose application in any given case would be determined using national survey data and a common statistical model, the courts could greatly reduce the cost and uncertainty of section 2 litigation. This approach would also reduce the dependence of vote dilution claims on often-unreliable techniques of ecological inference and would make coalitional claims brought jointly by two or more minority groups much easier to litigate.

The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This Article proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and who vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that the racial-stereotyping, polarized-voting, and population-size criteria would yield similar patterns of coverage, at least with respect to African Americans, and we show, ironically, that the new pattern of coverage would coincide with historic coverage under the \"outdated\" formula invalidated by Shelby County. Recently developed statistical techniques permit the new coverage formula to be further refined based on estimates of racial stereotyping within substate geographic units, such as cities and counties. We suggest that Congress establish default rules for coverage based on our state-level results, and delegate authority to make substate coverage determinations to an administrative agency (along with other responsibilities for keeping the coverage formula up to date). Finally, we show that if Congress does not act, the courts could use our results to reestablish coverage in a number of states, entering much broader \"bail in\" remedies for constitutional violations than would otherwise be justified.

Whether voting is racially polarized has for the last generation been the linchpin question in vote dilution cases under the core, nationally applicable provision of the Voting Rights Act. The polarization test is supposed to be clear-cut (\"manageable\"), diagnostic of liability, and free of strong racial assumptions. Using evidence from a random sample of vote dilution cases, we argue that these objectives have not been realized in practice and, further, that they cannot be realized under current conditions. The roots of the problem are twofold: (1) the widely shared belief that polarization determinations should be grounded on votes cast in actual elections; and (2) normative disagreement, often covert, about the meaning of racial vote dilution. We argue that the principal normative theories of vote dilution have conflicting implications for the racial-polarization test. We also show that votes are related only contingently to the political preferences that the polarization inquiry is supposed to reveal and, further, that the estimation of candidates' vote shares by racial group from ballots cast in actual elections depends on racial-homogeneity assumptions similar to those that the Supreme Court has disavowed. Our analysis casts serious doubt on the notion—promoted in dicta by the Supreme Court and supported by prominent commentators—that courts sfwuld establish bright-line vote-share cutoffs for \"legally significant\" racial polarization. The courts would do better to screen vote dilution claims using either evidence of preference polarization derived from surveys or nonpreference evidence of minority political incorporation.

With the growth of Latino and Asian American populations, candidates frequently must appeal to diverse electorates. Strategies for doing so include emphasizing candidates' racial/ethnic identity and securing endorsements from racial/ethnic groups. While many scholars focus on candidates' racial/ethnic attributes, ethnic group endorsements are understudied. Whether such endorsements induce voters to choose ideologically similar candidates (spatial voting), or choose based on race/ethnicity (racial voting) is unclear. We address this question by examining elections in multiethnic local settings. Using original surveys and exit polls, we create comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology, and examine how race/ethnicity and ideology affect voters' choices. We also embed experiments that manipulate ethnic group endorsements. We find that ideology influences voters' choices, but that ethnic group endorsements weaken spatial voting. The latter effect among whites is driven by racial/ethnic stereotypes. These reactions explain why some candidates seek such endorsements and why others might prefer to avoid them.

Too often, popular political power — whether it is in the form of direct democracy or other more innovative forays in participatory or deliberative democracy— presents itself principally as a counterweight to the political power parties wield. Yet setting up \"popular democracy \"and \"party democracy \"in opposition to one another in the American political landscape is not only unnecessary but also pathological: this oppositional posture risL · the ossification of party democracy and keeps popular democrats insulated from the substantial improvements the power of parties could bring to the polity. This Article, accordingly, seeks to enrich both party democracy and popular democracy by showing how each might draw strengths from the other, and how each needs the other to function more effectively. A new literature in political theory explores the central role of partisanship in democratic functioning, and we will deploy that theory in service of some practical applications in institutional design here. We have been involved — on the ground level — in two recent policy conversations that really would have been improved with a complementary vision of the parties and the people.We could have better exercises of party democracy and popular democracy, if only we started to see how they might be brought into pragmatic symbiosis.

Voters face difficult choices in local elections, where information about candidates is scarce and party labels often do not distinguish candidates' ideological positions. Can voters choose candidates who represent them ideologically in these contexts? To address this question, we conduct original surveys that ask candidates in the 2011 mayoral election in San Francisco to take positions on local policy issues. We ask voters their positions on these same policy issues on a written exit poll. We use these policy positions to construct comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (i.e., ideal points). Within the exit poll, we experimentally manipulate cues to examine their effects on voters' candidate preferences. We observe a strong, positive relationship between voter ideology and the ideology of the candidates they choose in the election. However, our experiments show that endorsements from political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations weaken this relationship. These findings challenge the view of local elections as nonideological and demonstrate that spatial voting theory can be usefully applied to local settings. They also indicate that voters may not treat political party and newspaper endorsements as signals of candidates' ideological positions, but rather as nonideological signals of partisan affinity or candidate quality/viability.

Efforts to educate citizens about the candidates and issues at stake in elections are widespread. These include distributing voter guides describing candidates’ policy views and interactive tools conveying similar information. Do these voter education tools help voters identify candidates who share their policy views? We address this question by conducting survey experiments that randomly assign a nonpartisan voter guide, political party endorsements, a spatial map showing voters their own and the candidates’ ideological positions, or both a spatial map and party endorsements. We find that each type of information strengthens the relationship between voters’ policy views and those of the candidates they choose. These effects are largest for uninformed voters. When spatial maps and party endorsements send conflicting signals, many voters choose candidates with more similar policy views, against their party’s recommendation. These results contribute to debates about citizen competence and demonstrate the efficacy of practical efforts to inform electorates.

Since 2016, California has adopted several laws to facilitate the development of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are secondary units on residential parcels. This article analyzes ADU permitting in the Bay Area and southern California under the newly liberalized legal regime using data collected by the state. The analyses indicate that ADUs represent a substantial share of recent housing permits, that ADUs are typically permitted on parcels with relatively good access to jobs, and that the relationship between a neighborhood’s ethnoracial composition and the prevalence of ADU permitting varies by county. These findings provide guidance for state and local governments seeking to understand where ADUs might be permitted following the liberalization of ADU regulation.

Political parties and civic organizations disseminate information to improve citizen decision making in local elections. Do citizens choose to consume such information and, if so, how does it affect their decisions? We conduct a survey experiment during a real-world local election that randomly assigns 1) political party endorsements, 2) a voter guide, 3) no information, or 4) a choice among these options. Respondents assigned to receive party endorsements and a voter guide are more likely than respondents receiving no information to choose candidates who share their policy views. When given a choice, a majority opts to receive information (including many with low levels of political interest), with most respondents preferring a voter guide. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that the effect of information on those who choose to receive it is substantial. These results offer hope that voter education efforts can succeed despite widespread political disinterest.