Andrew C. W. Myers

Publications

• Do Incumbents Still Enjoy a Financial Advantage? How Individuals Ceased to Advantage Incumbents While Corporate America Continues to Favor Them (Joint with Maria Silfa, Alexander Fouirnaies, and Andrew B. Hall). Forthcoming, American Political Science Review.
  Abstract | Appendix

  Incumbents have long enjoyed a substantial fundraising advantage in American elections, but it remains unclear whether this advantage has persisted as elections have become more partisan and nationalized in recent years. Pairing a regression discontinuity design with a comprehensive dataset covering U.S. House, U.S. Senate, gubernatorial, statewide executive, and state legislative elections, we present the first systematic evidence on the evolution of the financial incumbency advantage. Overall, we find that the financial advantage enjoyed by incumbents at all levels of government has declined 25% to 50% over the last decade. This decline, however, is driven entirely by individual donors, and especially small-dollar donors; in contrast, the advantage among corporate PACs has remained stable—or even increased. Taken together, these shifts reveal a campaign finance landscape that is increasingly shaped by partisanship on one side and strategic investment on the other.

  Coverage: Election Law Blog.

• Do Donors Punish Extremist Primary Nominees? Evidence from Congress and American State Legislatures. 2026. American Political Science Review.
  Abstract | Appendix | Replication Materials

  Fundraising is a critical element of legislative elections, yet problems of measurement and strategic candidate emergence have prevented researchers from evaluating how running extremist candidates affects parties’ fundraising prospects. This article combines an original candidate ideology scaling with a regression discontinuity design in primary elections in Congress, 1980–2022, and state legislatures, 1996–2022, to assess whether donors punish extremist nominees in general elections. I find that the "coin-flip" primary nomination of an extremist over a more-moderate opponent decreases their party’s share of general-election contributions by 7 percentage points in the median contest and 18–19 percentage points when the ideological contrast between candidates is largest. This financial penalty is larger among corporate PACs than individual donors and is driven symmetrically by donors withdrawing support from extremist nominees and rallying behind their opponents. Applying a complementary panel-based identification strategy, I replicate these core findings and further document that the financial penalty to extremist nominees has fallen by nearly half since 2000. Overall, these results show how general-election donors act as a marked, yet waning, moderating force in American politics when parties run extremist candidates.

  Award: Best Applied Poster, 2025 Society for Political Methodology Annual Meeting. Coverage: Not Another Politics Podcast, LSE U.S. Politics and Policy Blog.

• Press Coverage and Accountability in State Legislatures. 2026. American Political Science Review.
  Abstract | Appendix | Replication Materials

  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.

  Coverage: LSE U.S. Politics and Policy Blog, Political Science Now.

• Polarization and State Legislative Elections (Joint with Cassandra Handan-Nader and Andrew B. Hall). 2026. American Journal of Political Science.
  Abstract | Appendix | Replication Materials

  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.

  Coverage: New York Times, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Good Authority.

• 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.

  Coverage: Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Good Authority.

Working Papers

• Partisan Favoritism in Public Spending: Evidence from Congressional Earmarks (Joint with Liam Bethlendy and Alicia R. Chen).
  Abstract

  We study whether members of Congress use federal spending to favor co-partisan voters. Pairing an original, geocoded dataset covering U.S. earmark requests and allocations since the resumption of earmarking in FY2022 with a regression discontinuity design in House general elections, we find strong evidence of partisan favoritism. Narrowly electing a Democrat rather than a Republican shifts the average requested earmark dollar toward areas that are 8 percentage points more Democratic and increases the share of requested dollars to Democratic strongholds by 20 percentage points. This disparity persists across policy areas, is not explained by socio-demographic correlates of partisanship, extends beyond close elections, and carries through to enacted spending. Our results show that—rather than broadening representation—electoral incentives can push legislators to serve their supporters at the expense of their broader constituency.

• State Legislative Primary Election Returns Database, 1990–2026 (Joint with Steven Rogers, Alexander Fouirnaies, Andrew B. Hall, Cassandra Handan-Nader, and Jason Windett).
  Abstract | Link to database

  State legislative primary elections play a central role in selecting lawmakers in the American states, yet the absence of a comprehensive national database has limited systematic research on their outcomes. We introduce a new database of state legislative primary election returns covering all 50 states and both legislative chambers from 1990 through 2026. This dataset contains 159,573 candidate-election observations spanning 90,860 primary races and records candidates' names, primary and primary-runoff vote totals, and incumbency statuses. To facilitate applied research, we also link this dataset to existing databases on candidate ideology, campaign finance filings, and general-election returns. This database will enable systematic research on candidate entry, primary competition, ideological extremism, electoral accountability, and legislative representation in the American states.

• Do Claude Code and Codex P-Hack? Sycophancy and Statistical Analysis in Large Language Models (Joint with Samuel G. Z. Asher, Janet Malzahn, Jessica M. Persano, Elliot J. Paschal, and Andrew B. Hall).
  Abstract

  Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as research assistants for statistical analysis. A well-documented concern using LLMs is sycophancy, or the tendency to tell users what they want to hear rather than what is true. If sycophancy extends to statistical reasoning, LLM-assisted research could inadvertently automate p-hacking. We evaluate this possibility by asking two AI coding agents—Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI Codex (GPT-5.2-Codex)—to analyze datasets from four published political science papers with null or near-null results, varying the research framing and the pressure applied for significant findings in a 2x4 factorial design across 640 independent runs. Under standard prompting, both models produce remarkably stable estimates and explicitly refuse direct requests to p-hack, identifying them as scientific misconduct. However, a prompt that reframes specification search as uncertainty reporting bypasses these guardrails, causing both models to engage in systematic specification search. The degree of estimate inflation under this adversarial nudge tracks the analytical flexibility available in each research design: observational studies and regression discontinuity designs are more vulnerable than randomized experiments. These findings suggest that, at least in narrow estimation tasks, LLMs themselves are unlikely to bias results toward statistical significance, but safety guardrails are likely unable to restrain researchers intent on p-hacking.

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

  A central question about democracy is whether elected officials adapt their policymaking as their constituents' preferences change. Existing research, however, focuses exclusively on incumbents who remain in office following constituency change. This paper leverages redistricting in the U.S. House (1980-2024) and all ninety-eight partisan state legislatures (1990-2024) to provide a comprehensive account of how legislative representation changes when electorates are redrawn. Pairing a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design with roll-call- and interest-group-based measures of representation, I show that reelected incumbents adapt to their new electorates, but these within-legislator adjustments are modest relative to the representational shift associated with electing a new legislator. Instead, studying a new dataset of legislators' home addresses, I find that incumbents facing newly unfavorable electorates regularly decline to seek reelection and, conditional on running, are more likely to be voted out of office. Taken together, these results suggest that American legislative elections function less as a continuous incentive for policy convergence and more as a mechanism for filtering representatives.

Works in Progress

• Do Interest Group Endorsements Influence American Elections? (Joint with Alexander Fouirnaies).

• From Dollars to Ideal Points: Adjusting Campaign Finance Scalings for Co-Participation Bias (Joint with Cassandra Handan-Nader and Janet Malzahn).

• The Hidden Incumbency Advantage: How Officeholding Shapes Intra-Party Competition in American Legislative and Executive Elections (Joint with Janet Malzahn).

• How Much Turnover Is There in U.S. Voter Registration Lists? (Joint with Justin Grimmer and Kasey Rhee).