The SURGE Lab brings collaborators together from across the social sciences in order to produce cutting edge research on local government and politics.

Below, you will find a list of some of our working papers. For more information or for media requests, please email us.

All (Mayoral) Politics is Local?

Authors: Sanmay Das, Betsy Sinclair, Steven W. Webster, Hao Yan

American politics in the contemporary era has become highly “nationalized” — focused on national issues instead of local issues. Previous research has estimated nationalization via electoral vote shares and found significant state-level nationalization. We challenge the existing nationalization narrative by examining an alternative source of data — the political rhetoric used by mayors, state governors, and Members of Congress on Twitter. We analyze rhetoric in terms of partisanship and topic similarity. We find that gubernatorial rhetoric — but not mayoral rhetoric — closely matches that of Members of Congress. There are substantial differences in the topics and partisan content of mayoral speech. Our core finding is that the emphasis of mayoral speech is local; the office of the mayor has been more immune to the trends of nationalized politics.

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Crime and Presidential Accountability: A Case of Racially Conditioned Issue Ownership

Authors: Benjamin Noble, Andrew Reeves, Steven W. Webster

Americans are anxious about crime, regardless of their actual exposure or risk. Given this pervasive concern, U.S. presidents talk about the issue and often take actions to address crime. Indeed, it is not uncommon for presidents to list crime prevention efforts in their top accomplishments. We examine nearly twenty years of survey data and find that presidents may act this way, in part, because fear of crime translates into a penalty on presidential approval. Moreover, we find that there is a racial component to this fear. Whites only punish Democratic presidents (i.e., Clinton and Obama) and may even reward Republican presidents (i.e., Bush and Trump) when they are anxious about crime. In contrast, we find that non-whites punish all presidents when anxious about crime. Our results suggest that the relationship between fear of crime and presidential accountability is conditioned on an individual’s race and the president’s party.

NOTE: paper available soon