At Yale, Political Scientists Challenge Simple Stories About American Democracy

Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas “Tip” O’Neill popularized the phrase “All politics is local,” stressing the need for elected officials to address voters’ concerns in their state, district, or hometown. 

But even he might not have realized how local circumstances can shape an individual’s political identity.

At the Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) annual conference last month, Sahil Chinoy, a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, estimated that nearly half of the difference in young Americans’ party registration across counties can be traced to where they spent their childhood. And the effects may even be larger for whether they register and vote at all.

The findings set the tone for two days in which scholars challenged simple stories about American politics, revealing how much political behavior is shaped by environments, institutional rules, strategic incentives, and the tools researchers use to measure them.

“Research on American politics today can be both more accurate and more modest,” said Gregory Huber, director of CSAP, acting director of ISPS, and Forst Family Professor of Political Science. “More empirical and more capable of measuring complicated realities. But also more honest about how complicated those realities are.”

Huber introduced the conference with an invitation to break down the silos in which many researchers operate, even within the more restrictive field of American politics.

“We often never talk to people who work on subjects that can be a half step away,” he said. “This conference aims to get people into the same room in a way we might not have done since graduate school. To learn from different methodologies. And to crosspollinate among scholars at vastly different stages of their careers. Think of this as a chance to meet someone you wouldn’t otherwise meet.”

Researchers took that challenge seriously, moving from childhood neighborhoods to jury deliberations, corporate boardrooms, congressional hearings, district maps, and public opinion surveys — all in search of a deeper answer to how American politics really work.

Chinoy, who will be joining the faculty of Stanford University as an assistant professor of political science in the fall, built a large dataset with his collaborators linking voting records with address data, allowing them to follow millions of Americans from childhood to adulthood.

He shared findings suggesting that neighborhoods shape not just what party they register with but whether they engage in democracy at all. He said as much as 70% of the difference in voter registration and turnout are linked to childhood environment.

In addition, they found that ages 13 to 19 matter much more than earlier childhood, noting how a move from a county dominated by one party to a county dominated by the other party during those ages has an effect four to five times as large as with children moving from birth through age 12.

Chinoy emphasized that “place” includes many influential factors at once.

“It is literally everything,” he said. “It could be the quality of schools, the local labor market, whether it’s rural or urban.”

Amna Salam from the University of California, San Diego shared research asking how the characteristics of jurors — and the choices lawyers make in selecting them — can shape trial outcomes.

“Our jury pool is randomly drawn,” Salam said. “But the people who are actually impaneled in those juries might not be.”

She found that the increase in a juror’s aversion to wrongful conviction decreases the overall probability of conviction.

In addition, Salam found that more accurate jurors can also affect the likelihood of conviction, which may lead attorneys to remove more informed jurors from the pool.

“Lawyers may prefer to strike jurors who have better information at trial,” she said. “The legal system aims for fair and accurate decisions. But jury selection could undermine this goal.”

Nolan McCarty from Princeton University and his colleagues analyzed corporate filings to measure how often firms used language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to determine what drove the rise and fall of such initiatives.

They found the strongest evidence pointed toward the ideology of corporate leaders, some level of workforce ideology, and pressure or influence from large institutional investors.

Mayya Komisarchik from the University of Rochester presented her research on how courts can tell when congressional district maps weaken minority voting power. Using simulated maps and voters, she argued that strategic redistricting does not just shape elections — it makes it harder to measure whether minority voters are being treated unfairly.

“If mapmakers intentionally assign racial minority precincts to districts to create partisan advantage, that can scramble the relationship between race and voting that the statistical methods depend on,” she said. “The best measure is one that gets at the question whether a districting plan is racially polarized and not simply one that minimizes a statistical error score.”