We study whether competitive legislative districts cause higher voter turnout. To do so, we employ rich data on the 2006 to 2020 elections in North Carolina. We make use of variation in district competitiveness due to repeated bouts of redistricting, a process in which district boundaries are redrawn. Specifically, we compare people who share the same districts in each legislative chamber (U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House) before redistricting but who differ in districts after redistricting. We match these people on demographics, party registration, and pre-redistricting turnout. We then track their turnout behavior in post-redistricting elections. For the U.S. House, switching from an uncompetitive “80-20” district to a competitive “55-45” district increases turnout by a rate of 1 percentage point per election of exposure. For the state chambers, the magnitude is 0.6. Effects are highly persistent and sum across chambers. They appear to be explained in part by a learning channel, where living in a competitive district induces people to believe that races can be competitive.

District partisan slant shifts voters’ party affiliation: evidence from repeated redistricting in North Carolina

With Emanuel Garcia Munoz and Rudyard Kretschmar

Does the slant of a legislative district merely reflect the district’s voters, or can it also affect them? To investigate this, we collect rich data on districts and voters from the 2006-2022 elections in North Carolina. We exploit variation in slant due to redistricting, the process in which district boundaries are redrawn. We show that living in a district where one party is powerful causes people to shift their party affiliation toward that party. Effects increase with the number of elections of exposure and sum across legislative chambers. They also seem to stem from changes in preferences, not strategic behavior. An implication of the results is that uncompetitive districts contribute to polarization: under uncompetitive districts, people and places who lean Democratic get put into Democratic-controlled districts and become more Democratic; vice versa for those who lean Republican. As an illustration, we assess the impacts of the districts that were used in North Carolina during the 2010s. Relative to a counterfactual of competitive districts, the 2010s districts led to a sizable increase in geographic polarization—though only a slight increase in polarization at the individual level.

The effects of additional high school STEM exposure: evidence from admissions cutoffs, administrative data, and large-scale surveys

With Rajeev Dehejia, Andrei Munteanu, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola

We evaluate the impacts of being assigned to a STEM- versus humanities-focused high school curriculum. We use a regression discontinuity design, exploiting admissions cutoffs generated by a centralized assignment system in the country of Romania. We obtain outcomes using both administrative data and large-scale surveys. We find that being assigned to STEM causes students to think they are better at STEM, to like STEM more, and to be 20-25 percentage points more likely to study STEM in college. In addition, it does not appear to adversely affect wellbeing or social connections or to influence social and economic preferences. Effects are similar by gender and by initial curricular preferences, suggesting that additional high school STEM exposure may have widespread benefits.