Joe Loffredo

6/6
If you have questions or comments, please reach out to me, Mike, or Asya!

Check out the paper here: papers.ssrn.com/abstract=537....

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The broader takeaway: the success of democratic reforms depends on how they’re implemented.

Even well-designed efforts to improve representation can be blunted by those with the power to carry them out.

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Incumbent protection was most common when officials had both motive and opportunity:
– Smaller cities
– Whiter populations
– Lower turnout
– Competitive elections

The consequences were stark. Incumbent protection deterred challengers and reduced Latino electoral success.

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Using a redistricting simulation algorithm, we show that cities overwhelmingly drew lines that placed incumbents alone in their districts.

In 63% of cities, the enacted map ranked in the 99th percentile or higher for avoiding incumbent pairings.

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The California Voting Rights Act (2001) pushed hundreds of cities to switch from at-large to district elections to improve minority representation, especially for Latino communities.

But it left incumbent city councils in charge of approving the new district lines.

Reforms to improve representation fall short when those whose behavior they aim to constrain implement them.

With Asya Magazinnik and Michael Hankinson, we show how incumbent city councils drew district lines to protect themselves at the cost of minority representation. 🧵1/

Has anyone collected decennial Census demographics at the state legislative district-level going? If so, by any chance have data for 1990 and 2000 cycles?

@JoeyLoffredo and I have just finished the draft of a paper for this weekend's 2024 election conference at @SaintAnselm. We've posted it to SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... Here's the abstract and one of the graphs (showing how quickly states reported 90% of their votes in '20 & '24).

Has anyone collected roll call votes (aka “record votes”) from Texas during the 81st (2009) and 82nd (2011) legislative sessions?

Please reach out with questions or feedback!

CongressRA is still under development. We attempt to recreate the measurement creation process of Binder (2009) as a preliminary example of a use case. We welcome feedback on other ways to demonstrate the advantages of LLM agents.

We presented this paper at last week's "AI and the Study of Political Institutions" at USC's Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative. In our paper, we introduce CongressRA, an LLM agent for studying the US Congress to showcase our framework.

Specifically, we argue and try to show that LLMs, when equipped with predefined functions and data retrieval capabilities, can help researchers with data collection, processing, and analysis.

🚨New working paper🚨
Suyeol Yun and I are excited to present an early draft of a paper presenting the maximal use case of AI for political science. We show how LLMs can be extended to act as "comprehensive research assistants."
Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.....

Cast vote records: A database of ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Cast vote records: A database of ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election

This is a better link: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Our article about cast vote records in the 2020 election was published in Nature Scientific Data! The data is on Harvard Dataverse ready to be used!

nature.com/articles/s4159…

Does anyone know which states report which bills groups engage in lobby activity on? Wisconsin is a prime example of what I'm looking for. Colorado too. Trying to map which types of groups engage in activity on election bills.

Trust in the Count: Improving Voter Confidence with Post-election Audits Abstract. Post-election audits are thought to bolster voter confidence in elections, but it is unclear which aspects of audits drive public trust. Using pr

🚨New paper in POQ🚨
Excited to share my first publication in POQ’s issue on public trust in elections! We find that how post-election audits are conducted is more important for voter confidence than what audits find. Link: doi.org/10.1093/poq/....

This is a fantastic resource and glad to see it out for publication!