Dissertation Project 

​

Job market paper: "Elite Responses to Suffrage Expansion: The Rise of State and Local Elections in the U.S., 1776-1900"

​

Working paper: "The Rise (and Fall) of Elected Sheriffs" 

​

The Proliferation of State and Local Elections in the United States, 1776-1900

​

Circa 1787, Americans elected very few state and local officials.  Yet, by the 20th century they elected far more politicians than any other country. This feature is at the heart of our modern political system, but we know little about its origins and development. In this book-style dissertation, I present original data and a theoretical framework for thinking about "electoralization" -- the process by which state governments expanded the number of elected offices at the state and county levels -- in the century after Independence.

 

I present a model of a bargaining problem, faced by all governments, in which leaders must simultaneously fill public offices and fully fund the government's budget. Applying the model to the early American states, I argue that the growth of elective offices stemmed from political elites' fears that suffrage expansion would threaten their control of unitary executive power. To marshal evidence for my theory, I pair a novel dataset on electoralization from 1776 to 1900 with a difference-in-difference approach, taking advantage of the states' asynchronous timing of suffrage expansion to estimate the effect of Universal Male Suffrage on the number of elected offices.

​