Benjamin Schneer
Biographic Data
| ID | 4372230 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Schneer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Schneer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHNEER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Durable majority gerrymanders: Where partisan gerrymandering can displace democracy
We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders : electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward‐looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elect…
A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races
Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down‐ballot candidates to low‐quality or extreme top‐of‐the‐ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co‐partisan vote shares in down‐ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top‐of‐th…
A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreeme…
The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Colonial Virginia and the Early US House
Committee formation in early American legislatures happened when those assemblies were inundated with petitions, a relationship unexamined in institutional political science. We develop a model where a floor creates committees to respond to topic-specific petitions, predicting committee creation when petitions (1) are topically specific, (2) are spread across constituencies, and (3) have complex subject matter, and predicting committee appointmen…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949
For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for par…
Reevaluating Competition and Turnout in U.S. House Elections
Does electoral competitiveness boost turnout in U.S. House elections? Using an individual panel of turnout records compiled from the voter files of all 50 states, we exploit variation in district competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle to provide credible estimates of the effect of competitiveness on turnout. When tracking the same voters across time under differing levels of competitiveness, we precisely estimate the effect on tu…
Postpolitical Careers: How Politicians Capitalize on Public Office
Former government officials have many different opportunities to cash in on their public service, but most academic research and government ethics regulations focus on lobbying. We argue that this focus understates the extent and diversity of employment opportunities available to former officials. Using a new data set of officeholders in American government (members of Congress, governors, members of the cabinet, executive branch officials, and a…
From the Halls of Congress to K Street: Government Experience and its Value for Lobbying
Lobbying presents an attractive postcongressional career, with some former congressional members and staffers transitioning to lucrative lobbying careers. Precisely why congressional experience is valued is a matter of ongoing debate. Building on research positing a relationship between political uncertainty and demand for lobbyists, we examine conditions under which lobbyists with past congressional experience prove most valuable. To assess lobb…
Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940
The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sen…
Divided Government and Significant Legislation: A History of Congress from 1789 to 2010
This article presents and analyzes the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress—from 1789 to 2010—to test whether divided party control of government affects the number of important acts Congress passes. We find that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the nineteenth century and four additional such acts in the twentieth century. However, party control of government can…
Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing
Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time‐conscious), spatial (constrained by geography), and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between “door‐to‐door” and “attractor” (working in a…
How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas
Measuring the impact of the media The active participation of the people is one of the central components of a functioning democracy. King et al. performed a real-world randomized experiment in the United States to understand the causal effect of news stories on increasing public discussion of a specific topic (see the Policy Forum by Gentzkow). Social media posts increased by almost 20% the first day after the publication of news stories on a wi…
Party Formation through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834
When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning again…
Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940
The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sen…
Party Formation through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834
When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning again…
Postpolitical Careers: How Politicians Capitalize on Public Office
Former government officials have many different opportunities to cash in on their public service, but most academic research and government ethics regulations focus on lobbying. We argue that this focus understates the extent and diversity of employment opportunities available to former officials. Using a new data set of officeholders in American government (members of Congress, governors, members of the cabinet, executive branch officials, and a…
From the Halls of Congress to K Street: Government Experience and its Value for Lobbying
Lobbying presents an attractive postcongressional career, with some former congressional members and staffers transitioning to lucrative lobbying careers. Precisely why congressional experience is valued is a matter of ongoing debate. Building on research positing a relationship between political uncertainty and demand for lobbyists, we examine conditions under which lobbyists with past congressional experience prove most valuable. To assess lobb…
Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949
For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for par…
Reevaluating Competition and Turnout in U.S. House Elections
Does electoral competitiveness boost turnout in U.S. House elections? Using an individual panel of turnout records compiled from the voter files of all 50 states, we exploit variation in district competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle to provide credible estimates of the effect of competitiveness on turnout. When tracking the same voters across time under differing levels of competitiveness, we precisely estimate the effect on tu…
Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing
Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time‐conscious), spatial (constrained by geography), and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between “door‐to‐door” and “attractor” (working in a…
Divided Government and Significant Legislation: A History of Congress from 1789 to 2010
This article presents and analyzes the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress—from 1789 to 2010—to test whether divided party control of government affects the number of important acts Congress passes. We find that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the nineteenth century and four additional such acts in the twentieth century. However, party control of government can…
A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreeme…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Colonial Virginia and the Early US House
Committee formation in early American legislatures happened when those assemblies were inundated with petitions, a relationship unexamined in institutional political science. We develop a model where a floor creates committees to respond to topic-specific petitions, predicting committee creation when petitions (1) are topically specific, (2) are spread across constituencies, and (3) have complex subject matter, and predicting committee appointmen…
Party Formation through Petitions: The Whigs and the Bank War of 1832–1834
When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning again…
How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas
Measuring the impact of the media The active participation of the people is one of the central components of a functioning democracy. King et al. performed a real-world randomized experiment in the United States to understand the causal effect of news stories on increasing public discussion of a specific topic (see the Policy Forum by Gentzkow). Social media posts increased by almost 20% the first day after the publication of news stories on a wi…
Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940
The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sen…
Divided Government and Significant Legislation: A History of Congress from 1789 to 2010
This article presents and analyzes the most comprehensive database to date of significant acts of Congress—from 1789 to 2010—to test whether divided party control of government affects the number of important acts Congress passes. We find that unified control corresponds with one additional significant act passed per Congress in the nineteenth century and four additional such acts in the twentieth century. However, party control of government can…
Paths of Recruitment: Rational Social Prospecting in Petition Canvassing
Petition canvassers are political recruiters. Building upon the rational prospector model, we theorize that rational recruiting strategies are dynamic (Bayesian and time‐conscious), spatial (constrained by geography), and social (conditioned on relations between canvasser and prospect). Our theory predicts that canvassers will exhibit homophily in their canvassing preferences and will alternate between “door‐to‐door” and “attractor” (working in a…
Reevaluating Competition and Turnout in U.S. House Elections
Does electoral competitiveness boost turnout in U.S. House elections? Using an individual panel of turnout records compiled from the voter files of all 50 states, we exploit variation in district competitiveness induced by the 2012 redistricting cycle to provide credible estimates of the effect of competitiveness on turnout. When tracking the same voters across time under differing levels of competitiveness, we precisely estimate the effect on tu…
Postpolitical Careers: How Politicians Capitalize on Public Office
Former government officials have many different opportunities to cash in on their public service, but most academic research and government ethics regulations focus on lobbying. We argue that this focus understates the extent and diversity of employment opportunities available to former officials. Using a new data set of officeholders in American government (members of Congress, governors, members of the cabinet, executive branch officials, and a…
From the Halls of Congress to K Street: Government Experience and its Value for Lobbying
Lobbying presents an attractive postcongressional career, with some former congressional members and staffers transitioning to lucrative lobbying careers. Precisely why congressional experience is valued is a matter of ongoing debate. Building on research positing a relationship between political uncertainty and demand for lobbyists, we examine conditions under which lobbyists with past congressional experience prove most valuable. To assess lobb…
Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949
For much of American political history, the electoral franchise was restricted to only a portion of the population. By contrast, the right to petition was considered universal and enshrined in the First Amendment, giving voice to the voteless. Petitioning thus served as a fundamental mechanism of representation. Still, fundamental questions remain: How was petitioning used, how did Congress respond to petitions, and did the petition allow for par…
The Popular Origins of Legislative Jurisdictions: Petitions and Standing Committee Formation in Colonial Virginia and the Early US House
Committee formation in early American legislatures happened when those assemblies were inundated with petitions, a relationship unexamined in institutional political science. We develop a model where a floor creates committees to respond to topic-specific petitions, predicting committee creation when petitions (1) are topically specific, (2) are spread across constituencies, and (3) have complex subject matter, and predicting committee appointmen…
Partisan Alignment Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Redistricting
A Partisan Solution to Partisan Gerrymandering: The Define–Combine Procedure
Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define–Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreeme…
A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races
Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down‐ballot candidates to low‐quality or extreme top‐of‐the‐ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co‐partisan vote shares in down‐ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top‐of‐th…
Durable majority gerrymanders: Where partisan gerrymandering can displace democracy
We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders : electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward‐looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elect…
Politics (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Public Administration (7 works) · Public Administration (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (6 works) · Democracy (5 works)