Jesse Yoder

We have a New Working Paper on the political economy of politicians’ neighborhoods! We show that politicians live in richer neighborhoods and protect them from undesirable buildings and the removal of public goods. A thread 1/11, and the Paper: nottingham.ac.uk/research/group…

@namalhotra @JakeMGrumbach Added this to the paper recently (partly in response to your feedback on the original tweet)! Section A.5 of the appendix uses measure of home equity. Basic story is bc candidates tend to have purchased earlier in time compared to non-candidates, equity measure increases gaps

@JakeMGrumbach This is a great paper / dataset, but my understanding is that it doesn’t have data on mortgage liabilities (so only one side of net worth equation).

I just read this paper and it's important. One argument for devolving authority downward is that local officials are assumed be more representative of their communities than "distant" feds in Washington. But local candidates are still unrepresentatively wealthy!

@chrislhayes The guy who plays Spider in School of Rock is currently the elected District Attorney of Tyler County, Texas

.@beckerdavidj praises the election workers and volunteers who put in long hours to count ballots: "We won't know all of their names. It's too bad, because they are heroes of democracy." cbsnews.com/live-updates/2…

Paper is osf.io/preprints/soca…. Election aggregates and even polls are ambiguous wrt actual rate of ticket splitting. For anyone planning to work w/ election administrators to study this data in other states, I'd love to get in touch.

@danmthomp thinking about this live stream again, but this time for Maricopa 🙃: recorder.maricopa.gov/multimedia/btc…

@blfraga @hezaproject @BradSpahn @jon_m_rob @otis_reid @al_yan1 Is there a link to the paper? Would love to read :)

@hezaproject @BradSpahn @jon_m_rob @otis_reid @al_yan1 Yes, that's the takeaway: Don't depend on a current VF snapshot + vote history as a good indicator of total turnout in preceding elections, even very recent elections.

@mldunham Thanks Mike for engaging so deeply with my work! Your thread suggests a lot of interesting follow ups

@jesselyoder - It'd be interesting to study whether candidate preparation programs like Emerge (ca.emergeamerica.org) or Leadership for Educational Equity (educationalequity.org) blunt the wealth effects seen in normal races. Could a little knowledge and training go a long way?

How much wealthier are local elected officials in the US than those they represent, and why? In a new paper, I link candidates in CA to their home values to estimate wealth gaps between candidates and constituents. (stanford.edu/~yoderj/candid…)

@KNF100 Sure thing. In sec 3.3 I discuss incorporating renters into the analysis. Some challenges in doing so, but I show in the appendix that bc homeownership rate among candidates > homeownership rate among public, incorporating renters increases the wealth gap estimates even more

@jesselyoder I’m genuinely interested in knowing how renters were factored into your research.

@cyril_ry One example: seattle.gov/democracyvouch… h/t: @hill_charlotte

@jesselyoder This is valuable insight. Is there evidence of such policies implemented somewhere?

@namalhotra Thanks Neil! CA counties and CoreLogic do record mortgage transactions, along with the date, amount, type (conventional vs. fha), etc. I'm setting those aside for now: just asking whether candidates' owner-occupied units are higher value, but working on incorporating this info

@jesselyoder This is cool work. I look forward to reading. I guess you can get the housing value (sale price, sale date, etc) from CoreLogic, but how do you get their mortgage balances? Is that some required disclosure?

@TobiasNowacki Thanks Toby!

Great work (once again) by @jesselyoder. Even at the most local levels, elected officials are wealthier than the electorate they represent. Suggests that wealthier candidates are more successful because of fundraising advantage.

Taken together, the findings show large wealth gaps between elected officials and those they represent at all levels of elected office + many features of elections may contribute to the gap. This is a draft version, so all feedback welcome!

Finally, I show switching from at-large to district elections, a reform many localities in CA adopted in staggered fashion due to CA Voting Rights Act, seemed to decrease the wealth gap, at least for school board races, possibly bc the reform reduces costs of campaigning.