Nicolas Studen

While Supreme Court nominations have become increasingly high-salience political events, we know little about their prioritization relative to other issues by core constituency groups. We examine how individual donors and the mass public prioritize nominations, as well as factors they believe presidents should consider when selecting judges. To do so, we constructed original questions for a survey of over 7,000 validated donors and a comparison general population sample. We find donors are substantially more likely to prioritize nominations than their general public co-partisans, particularly Republican donors. Further analysis suggests the prioritization gap is consistent with theories that donors are motivated to move policy toward the ideological extremes. Analyzing policy positions, the largest donor-public difference occurs for diversity in appointments, but for all positions we find smaller differences than for prioritization. Overall, the findings highlight donors' policy priorities may diverge from those of the public even more than policy positions do.

Why do certain professions dominate elected office in the United States? I demonstrate that occupational donor networks provide unequal access to early campaign funds. To do so, I construct an original dataset that classifies 2.7 million donors and nearly 12,000 candidates into shared occupational categories across congressional and state legislative elections (2003–2022). I find that candidates raise an additional 7 percentage points of their individual contributions from donors who share their occupation, relative to competitors in the same race. This advantage is driven by mobilizing more donors, remains strong in the first 90 days, and extends across state and party lines. Yet only high-income professions, such as law, medicine, and business, convert occupational affinity into a net fundraising advantage. Evidence on mechanisms points to network mobilization and professional identity, not policy investment. Together, these dynamics channel early capital toward a narrow set of professions, compounding their advantages in seeking office.

Most research on the electoral penalty of candidate ideology relies on between-district or longitudinal comparisons, which are confounded by turnout and ballot composition effects. We employ a within-precinct design using granular precinct-level election data from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (2016–2022) alongside comprehensive data on candidate ideology. By analyzing within-precinct variation in two-party vote shares for contests simultaneously appearing on the same ballot, we isolate the effect of ideology on vote choice among a fixed electorate. We estimate how voters respond to candidate ideology in terms of vote choice across diverse electoral contexts, holding turnout fixed. A standard deviation change in the midpoint between candidates results in an average vote share penalty of 0.6 percentage points. The effect varies with office type, information availability, incumbency status, and partisan geography. Overall, we find that gains associated with ideological moderation are relatively modest and likely secondary to turnout effects.

How do interest groups pursue favorable policy? Existing research suggests that groups donate to lawmakers to secure short-term access to policymaking. However, this line of work primarily focuses on the relationship between groups and established legislators. An alternate approach, the group-centered theory of parties, emphasizes group support of friendly politicians early in their legislative careers. In this paper, I examine the empirical connection between early group support and downstream legislator behavior. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find legislators who receive substantial contributions from members of a specific profession in their first congressional primary are more inclined to introduce both policy-relevant and group-endorsed legislation throughout their career. This advocacy does not extend to related but competing groups. Coordinated early group support, measured as within-district contribution share, also appears related to legislator behavior. In all, these results provide empirical evidence for a group-centered theory of parties, where interest groups wield their influence early in the electoral process to get loyal "champions" elected to office.

We show that in a non-staggered difference-in-differences setting with an unbalanced panel, including unit fixed effects can generate spurious pre-trend violations in canonical event-study specifications — even when parallel trends hold exactly in the raw data. The bias arises because unit fixed effects demean pre-treatment outcomes with respect to units' entire outcome history, which includes post-treatment periods. Therefore when treatment effects are nonzero, the unit-specific mean absorbs the treatment effect and can create the false appearance of pre-trends. We show that this bias requires two conditions operating jointly: (i) an unbalanced panel in which treated units enter at different times (entry cohorts), and (ii) heterogeneous treatment effects across entry cohorts. We derive these results analytically, confirm them via simulation, and propose a matching-based alternative that resolves this issue.

Members of Congress introduce bills far more often than they pass them, and much of that activity is position-taking aimed at an attentive audience. We ask whether one such audience, ideological donors, responds to a particularly pure form of position-taking: bills that attack the courts. Using a panel of legislator donor pools linked to court-curbing sponsorship and to salient Supreme Court rulings, we test three expectations. First, sponsorship reweights a legislator's donor pool toward her ideological wing, a shift that survives comparison to legislators on the same pre-introduction trajectory. Second, the response is ideological rather than generic: aligned contributors move while political action committees do not. Third, it is largest when a salient ruling against the sponsor's coalition immediately precedes the bill. This last pattern is sharpest for abortion. Court-curbing functions as a donor signal, activated when the Court supplies the grievance.