Matthew Meredith
Biographic Data
| ID | 215040 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew Meredith |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew |
| FAMILY NAME | Meredith |
| SIGNATURE | MEREDITH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4535-8511 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 458 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Election administration harms and ballot design: A study of Florida's 2018 United States Senate race
We introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design f…
E-dentification, the use of teledentistry for remote personal forensic identification in forensic odontology: A Queensland experience
Dental comparison is recognized by the International Criminal Police Organization as one of three primary forensic identification techniques that can provide conclusive findings. Queensland is a large Australian state with a centralized forensic odontology service located at Queensland Health's Coronial and Public Health Sciences (CPHS) in Brisbane, which sits in the state's South-Eastern corner. Almost half of the Queensland population is locate…
Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling-Place Assignment on Voting
A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to t…
The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian , in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that maj…
One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electr…
Party Polarization, Ideological Sorting and the Emergence of the US Partisan Gender Gap
This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-exis…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison
The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to…
Regression Discontinuity Design
Social scientists search for interventions in the real world that approximate the conditions of an experiment. One form of such natural experiments that is increasingly used in social science research is regression discontinuity (RD). RD designs are possible when there are thresholds that cause large changes in the assignment of treatments on the basis of small differences in a variable. For example, a high school junior in the state of Pennsylva…
The Politics of the Restoration of Ex-Felon Voting Rights: The Case of Iowa
We investigate how the restoration of voting rights affects the political participation of ex-felons. Our primary analysis uses unique administrative data from Iowa, which changed how ex-felons restore their voting rights in both 2005 and 2011. Prior to 2005, ex-felons had to apply to the governor to restore their voting rights. We show that ex-felon turnout increased after Iowa began to automatically restore these rights. Consistent with misinfo…
The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America
Journal Article The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America Get access The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America by Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost. New York, New York University Press, 2013. 269 pp. $30.00. Marc Meredith Marc Meredith University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume…
Can Incarcerated Felons Be (Re)integrated into the Political System? Results from a Field Experiment
How does America's high rate of incarceration shape political participation? Few studies have examined the direct effects of incarceration on patterns of political engagement. Answering this question is particularly relevant for the 93% of formerly incarcerated individuals who are eligible to vote. Drawing on new administrative data from Connecticut, we present evidence from a field experiment showing that a simple informational outreach campaign…
Mecro‐Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro‐Perceptions of the Macro‐Economy
We develop an incomplete information theory of economic voting, where voters' information about macro‐economic performance is determined by the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. We test our theory using both cross‐sectional and time‐series survey data. A novel survey instrument that asks respondents their numerical assessment of the unemployment rate confirms that individuals' economic information responds to the economic condi…
Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout
Previous research documents widespread confusion about who can and cannot vote among people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. This research, and considerable activism drawing attention to the issue, has spurred a number of state legislatures to pass laws requiring the states to notify ex-felons about their voting rights. The purpose of this article is to better understand the policy processes that produce these notifica…
Evaluation of the suchey–brooks method of age estimation in an Australian subpopulation using computed tomography of the pubic symphyseal surface
Despite the prominent use of the Suchey–Brooks (S–B) method of age estimation in forensic anthropological practice, it is subject to intrinsic limitations, with reports of differential interpopulation error rates between geographical locations. This study assessed the accuracy of the S–B method to a contemporary adult population in Queensland, Australia and provides robust age parameters calibrated for our population. Three‐dimensional surface re…
On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects
Asking About Numbers: Why and How
Survey questions about quantities offer a number of advantages over more common qualitative questions. However, concerns about survey respondents' abilities to accurately report numbers have limited the use of quantitative questions. This article shows quantitative questions are feasible and useful for the study of economic voting. First, survey respondents are capable of accurately assessing familiar economic quantities, such as the price of gas…
Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects
Federalist democracies often hold concurrent elections for multiple offices. A potential consequence of simultaneously voting for multiple offices that vary with respect to scope and scale is that the personal appeal of candidates in a high-profile race may affect electoral outcomes in less salient races. In this article I estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers u…
The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Based Approach
During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out six pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent’s conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had a politically significant effect on the challenger’s vote share, which is statistically significant in most, bu…
Persistence in Political Participation
This paper uses discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past eligibility on subsequent participation decisions and partisan identification. It compares participation decisions and partisan affiliations of individuals who turned 18 just before past elections with those who turned 18 just after. It presents three main findings. First, past presidential election eligibility increases the probability of subsequent…
Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments
Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that unequal political representation in a legislature leads to an unequal distribution of funds, testing such theories empirically is challenging because it is difficult to separate the effects of representation from the effects of either population levels or changes. We leverage the natural experiment generated by infrequent and discrete census apportionment cycles to estimate the dis…
Contextual priming: Where people vote affects how they vote
American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were assigned to vote in schools were more likely to support a school funding initiative. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters' political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics…
Persistence in Political Participation
This paper uses discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past eligibility on subsequent participation decisions and partisan identification. It compares participation decisions and partisan affiliations of individuals who turned 18 just before past elections with those who turned 18 just after. It presents three main findings. First, past presidential election eligibility increases the probability of subsequent…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects
Federalist democracies often hold concurrent elections for multiple offices. A potential consequence of simultaneously voting for multiple offices that vary with respect to scope and scale is that the personal appeal of candidates in a high-profile race may affect electoral outcomes in less salient races. In this article I estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers u…
Asking About Numbers: Why and How
Survey questions about quantities offer a number of advantages over more common qualitative questions. However, concerns about survey respondents' abilities to accurately report numbers have limited the use of quantitative questions. This article shows quantitative questions are feasible and useful for the study of economic voting. First, survey respondents are capable of accurately assessing familiar economic quantities, such as the price of gas…
On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects
The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian , in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that maj…
Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison
The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to…
Party Polarization, Ideological Sorting and the Emergence of the US Partisan Gender Gap
This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-exis…
The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Based Approach
During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out six pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent’s conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had a politically significant effect on the challenger’s vote share, which is statistically significant in most, bu…
Can Incarcerated Felons Be (Re)integrated into the Political System? Results from a Field Experiment
How does America's high rate of incarceration shape political participation? Few studies have examined the direct effects of incarceration on patterns of political engagement. Answering this question is particularly relevant for the 93% of formerly incarcerated individuals who are eligible to vote. Drawing on new administrative data from Connecticut, we present evidence from a field experiment showing that a simple informational outreach campaign…
Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout
Previous research documents widespread confusion about who can and cannot vote among people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. This research, and considerable activism drawing attention to the issue, has spurred a number of state legislatures to pass laws requiring the states to notify ex-felons about their voting rights. The purpose of this article is to better understand the policy processes that produce these notifica…
The Politics of the Restoration of Ex-Felon Voting Rights: The Case of Iowa
We investigate how the restoration of voting rights affects the political participation of ex-felons. Our primary analysis uses unique administrative data from Iowa, which changed how ex-felons restore their voting rights in both 2005 and 2011. Prior to 2005, ex-felons had to apply to the governor to restore their voting rights. We show that ex-felon turnout increased after Iowa began to automatically restore these rights. Consistent with misinfo…
One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electr…
Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments
Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that unequal political representation in a legislature leads to an unequal distribution of funds, testing such theories empirically is challenging because it is difficult to separate the effects of representation from the effects of either population levels or changes. We leverage the natural experiment generated by infrequent and discrete census apportionment cycles to estimate the dis…
Evaluation of the suchey–brooks method of age estimation in an Australian subpopulation using computed tomography of the pubic symphyseal surface
Despite the prominent use of the Suchey–Brooks (S–B) method of age estimation in forensic anthropological practice, it is subject to intrinsic limitations, with reports of differential interpopulation error rates between geographical locations. This study assessed the accuracy of the S–B method to a contemporary adult population in Queensland, Australia and provides robust age parameters calibrated for our population. Three‐dimensional surface re…
The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America
Journal Article The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America Get access The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America by Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost. New York, New York University Press, 2013. 269 pp. $30.00. Marc Meredith Marc Meredith University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume…
Election administration harms and ballot design: A study of Florida's 2018 United States Senate race
We introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design f…
Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling-Place Assignment on Voting
A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to t…
Contextual priming: Where people vote affects how they vote
American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were assigned to vote in schools were more likely to support a school funding initiative. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters' political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics…
Persistence in Political Participation
This paper uses discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past eligibility on subsequent participation decisions and partisan identification. It compares participation decisions and partisan affiliations of individuals who turned 18 just before past elections with those who turned 18 just after. It presents three main findings. First, past presidential election eligibility increases the probability of subsequent…
Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments
Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that unequal political representation in a legislature leads to an unequal distribution of funds, testing such theories empirically is challenging because it is difficult to separate the effects of representation from the effects of either population levels or changes. We leverage the natural experiment generated by infrequent and discrete census apportionment cycles to estimate the dis…
The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Based Approach
During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out six pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent’s conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had a politically significant effect on the challenger’s vote share, which is statistically significant in most, bu…
Evaluation of the suchey–brooks method of age estimation in an Australian subpopulation using computed tomography of the pubic symphyseal surface
Despite the prominent use of the Suchey–Brooks (S–B) method of age estimation in forensic anthropological practice, it is subject to intrinsic limitations, with reports of differential interpopulation error rates between geographical locations. This study assessed the accuracy of the S–B method to a contemporary adult population in Queensland, Australia and provides robust age parameters calibrated for our population. Three‐dimensional surface re…
On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects
Asking About Numbers: Why and How
Survey questions about quantities offer a number of advantages over more common qualitative questions. However, concerns about survey respondents' abilities to accurately report numbers have limited the use of quantitative questions. This article shows quantitative questions are feasible and useful for the study of economic voting. First, survey respondents are capable of accurately assessing familiar economic quantities, such as the price of gas…
Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects
Federalist democracies often hold concurrent elections for multiple offices. A potential consequence of simultaneously voting for multiple offices that vary with respect to scope and scale is that the personal appeal of candidates in a high-profile race may affect electoral outcomes in less salient races. In this article I estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers u…
Mecro‐Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro‐Perceptions of the Macro‐Economy
We develop an incomplete information theory of economic voting, where voters' information about macro‐economic performance is determined by the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. We test our theory using both cross‐sectional and time‐series survey data. A novel survey instrument that asks respondents their numerical assessment of the unemployment rate confirms that individuals' economic information responds to the economic condi…
Do Voting Rights Notification Laws Increase Ex-Felon Turnout
Previous research documents widespread confusion about who can and cannot vote among people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system. This research, and considerable activism drawing attention to the issue, has spurred a number of state legislatures to pass laws requiring the states to notify ex-felons about their voting rights. The purpose of this article is to better understand the policy processes that produce these notifica…
Regression Discontinuity Design
Social scientists search for interventions in the real world that approximate the conditions of an experiment. One form of such natural experiments that is increasingly used in social science research is regression discontinuity (RD). RD designs are possible when there are thresholds that cause large changes in the assignment of treatments on the basis of small differences in a variable. For example, a high school junior in the state of Pennsylva…
The Politics of the Restoration of Ex-Felon Voting Rights: The Case of Iowa
We investigate how the restoration of voting rights affects the political participation of ex-felons. Our primary analysis uses unique administrative data from Iowa, which changed how ex-felons restore their voting rights in both 2005 and 2011. Prior to 2005, ex-felons had to apply to the governor to restore their voting rights. We show that ex-felon turnout increased after Iowa began to automatically restore these rights. Consistent with misinfo…
The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America
Journal Article The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America Get access The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America by Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost. New York, New York University Press, 2013. 269 pp. $30.00. Marc Meredith Marc Meredith University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume…
Can Incarcerated Felons Be (Re)integrated into the Political System? Results from a Field Experiment
How does America's high rate of incarceration shape political participation? Few studies have examined the direct effects of incarceration on patterns of political engagement. Answering this question is particularly relevant for the 93% of formerly incarcerated individuals who are eligible to vote. Drawing on new administrative data from Connecticut, we present evidence from a field experiment showing that a simple informational outreach campaign…
Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison
The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections
Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electr…
Party Polarization, Ideological Sorting and the Emergence of the US Partisan Gender Gap
This article argues that the modern American partisan gender gap – the tendency of men to identify more as Republicans and less as Democrats than women – emerged largely because of mass-level ideological party sorting. As the two major US political parties ideologically polarized at the elite level, the public gradually perceived this polarization and better sorted themselves into the parties that matched their policy preferences. Stable pre-exis…
The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian , in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that maj…
Blocks as Geographic Discontinuities: The Effect of Polling-Place Assignment on Voting
A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to t…
Election administration harms and ballot design: A study of Florida's 2018 United States Senate race
We introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design f…
E-dentification, the use of teledentistry for remote personal forensic identification in forensic odontology: A Queensland experience
Dental comparison is recognized by the International Criminal Police Organization as one of three primary forensic identification techniques that can provide conclusive findings. Queensland is a large Australian state with a centralized forensic odontology service located at Queensland Health's Coronial and Public Health Sciences (CPHS) in Brisbane, which sits in the state's South-Eastern corner. Almost half of the Queensland population is locate…
Political science (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Economics (13 works) · Voting (13 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Demographic economics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)