Andrew C. W. Myers

Publications

• Press Coverage and Accountability in State Legislatures. Conditionally accepted, American Political Science Review.
  Abstract | Appendix

  State legislatures are critical policymaking bodies, yet recent studies suggest that elections rarely hold state legislators accountable for their representation and voters generally know little about legislative politics. Would state legislatures function differently if voters had access to more information about legislative politics? Leveraging the haphazard overlap of newspaper markets and legislative districts, I construct and validate a measure of legislative press coverage in all 98 partisan state legislative chambers for the years 2000-2022 that is plausibly uncorrelated with other district-level variables. Drawing on this large-scale dataset, this paper traces the impact of press coverage on state legislative voters, elections, and, ultimately, representation. I find that robust local press coverage substantially augments down-ballot voter engagement, the electoral return to ideological moderation, and the incumbency advantage. Once in office, I further document that state legislators who receive stronger press coverage work more for their constituencies and diverge less from their district’s median voter. Overall, these results suggest that state legislators would be more moderate, representative, and productive were local press coverage strengthened.

• Polarization and State Legislative Elections (Joint with Cassandra Handan-Nader and Andrew B. Hall). Conditionally accepted, American Journal of Political Science.
  Abstract | Appendix

  U.S. state legislatures are critical policymaking institutions that are increasingly polarized, yet data and measurement limitations have prevented researchers from understanding how state legislative elections contribute to this polarization. To address this gap, we construct new measures of candidate ideology based on campaign contributions and roll-call votes, and we use them to offer the first systematic study of the relationship between candidate ideology and electoral outcomes in primary and general elections in state legislatures, 2000-2022. We find that the set of people running for state legislature has polarized substantially in recent decades. More-moderate candidates enjoy a meaningful advantage in contested general elections, but that advantage has declined somewhat in recent years. At the same time, more-extreme candidates are favored in contested primary elections. These new measures and data will allow researchers to build on these basic findings to understand how elections function in lower-information, lower-salience environments like American state legislatures.

• Are Dead People Voting By Mail? Evidence From Washington State Administrative Records (Joint with Jennifer Wu, Chenoa Yorgason, Hanna Folsz, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall). 2024. Election Law Journal.
  Abstract | Appendix

  A common concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. Studying Washington state’s vote-by-mail program, we link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state (2011–2018), we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for name-matching and the inclusion of deaths closer to Election Day, we conclude that counting dead people’s ballots as votes seems extraordinarily rare in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.

• How Did Absentee Voting Impact the 2020 U.S. Election? (Joint with Jesse Yoder, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer A. Wu, Chenoa Yorgason, and Andrew B. Hall). 2021. Science Advances.
  Abstract | Appendix | Replication Materials

  The 2020 U.S. election saw a record turnout, saw a huge increase in absentee voting, and brought unified national Democratic control—yet these facts alone do not imply that vote-by-mail increased turnout or benefited Democrats. Using new microdata on millions of individual voters and aggregated turnout data across all 50 states, this paper offers a causal analysis of the impact of absentee vote-by-mail during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Focusing on natural experiments in Texas and Indiana, we find that 65-year-olds voted at nearly the same rate as 64-year-olds, despite the fact that only 65-year-olds could vote absentee without an excuse. Being just old enough to vote no-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout. Voter interest appeared to be more important in driving turnout across vote modes, neutralizing the electoral impact of Democrats voting by mail at higher rates during the historic pandemic.

Working Papers

• Do Donors Punish Extremist Primary Nominees? Evidence from Congress and American State Legislatures.
  Abstract

  Fundraising is a critical element of legislative elections, yet problems of endogeneity and measurement have prevented researchers from systematically evaluating whether campaign contributions advantage relative moderate or extremist candidates. This paper combines an original candidate ideology scaling with a regression discontinuity design in primary elections in Congress, 1980-2022, and state legislatures, 1996-2022, to evaluate whether donors advantage more-moderate or more-extreme candidates. I find that the "coin-flip" primary nomination of an extremist candidate over a moderate decreases their party's share of general-election contributions by 5-6 percentage points in the median contested primary and 24-28 percentage points when the ideological contrast between candidates is largest. This financial penalty is twice as large for corporate PACs and out-of-state donors as it is for individual and in-state donors. Applying a complementary panel-based identification strategy, I replicate these core findings and further find that the financial penalty to extremists has declined by nearly 50% since 1996. Overall, these results show how general-election donors act as an important, yet waning, moderating force in American elections.

• How Do Legislators Adapt to New Electorates? Evidence from Redistricting in Congress and U.S. State Legislatures.
  Abstract

  A central question about democracy is whether elected officials adapt to their constituents’ preferences, yet existing research yields conflicting answers. This paper leverages redistricting in Congress and ninety-eight American state legislatures for the years 1990 to 2024 to systematically evaluate how incumbents adapt to changes in their electorate. Pairing a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design with roll calland interest group-based measures of ideology, I find that reelected incumbents adapt their ideological representation to their reapportioned districts, but this effect is only 15% the size of the change in representation that accompanies the replacement of an incumbent with a new legislator. Building a new dataset of legislators’ home addresses, I instead find that incumbents’ decisions to seek reelection are highly sensitive to the ideological composition of their presumptive electorate, and voters regularly replace remaining out-of-step incumbents. These findings imply that policy change in Congress and state legislatures is primarily facilitated by legislator replacement, rather than adaptation, matching the theoretical expectations of citizen-candidate models as opposed to models of Downsian convergence.

• Why Do Term Limits Polarize State Legislatures?
  Abstract

  Term limits have dramatically reshaped many features of legislative politics, yet how these policies contribute to rising legislative polarization remains unclear. Pairing an original dataset of local newspaper coverage and roll call-based candidate ideology scalings with a difference-in-differences design for the years 1992-2022, this paper traces the effect of term limits on legislative polarization across the candidate pipeline. I find that newspaper coverage of legislative elections declines sharply as well-connected incumbents are termed out, translating into diminished voter knowledge about their state legislators. Consequently, term limits systematically attenuate traditional electoral returns to moderation in general elections. As the electoral benefits of ideological moderation decline, I find that the pool of primary- and general-election office-seekers polarizes and, ultimately, election winners become mechanically more extreme in term-limited states. These findings help explain why term limits polarize state legislatures and illustrate how both declining news coverage and the scarcity of moderate candidates contribute to legislative polarization.