Side Hustles: How Politicians' Outside Jobs Shape Our Democracies Book manuscript.
Despite being permitted in over 80 percent of democracies, legislators' outside employment remains poorly understood. Proponents argue such jobs keep lawmakers connected to the real world, build expertise, and broaden the pool of political candidates. Critics counter that outside arrangements allow moneyed interests to purchase access to politicians, distort legislative behavior, and leave constituents underserved. Side Hustles subjects these claims to empirical scrutiny using the most comprehensive dataset on legislative outside employment to date — nearly 30,000 legislator-years from more than 5,000 parliamentarians across ten countries. The evidence suggests that the negative consequences of outside jobs outweigh the positive one's, and that moonlighting on balance worsens the quality of democracy.
Political Parties' Cooperation and Conflict across the Election Cycle: An Analysis of Media Reports in Seven Western Party Systems With James Adams and Christopher Wlezien.
Party elites' interactions influence democracies' abilities to address important problems, and also affect citizens' feeling of political trust and efficacy along with their affect towards political oppo-nents. But what drives cooperation and conflict between elites from different parties? We hypothe-size patterns of elite-level, inter-party interactions across the entire election cycle (unlike previous research which mostly analyzes election campaigns), which we evaluate by analyzing codings of tens of thousands of media reports of elite interactions from seven western party systems between 2001 and 2019. We find that party elites initiate higher proportions of cooperative cross-party in-teractions when they are in government, and that they initiate more conflictual interactions towards opponents whose poll numbers are improving. We also find that elite-level conflict tends to escalate several months before national elections, but that there is a protracted “post-election honeymoon” period, especially for governing parties. Our findings have implications for party elites' strategies and for mass-level political trust, efficacy, and polarization.