Patrick Flavin

Finds that state policymakers enact teacher quality reforms when white students are performing poorly, but there is no comparative response when African American students are performing poorly. We then probe a possible mechanism of this finding and show that one reason policymakers are more responsive to white student achievement is because regular voters base their evaluations of school quality and whether reforms are needed almost exclusively on the basis of how white students are performing.

Assesses the effect of public policy regimes in industrial democracies on self-reported life satisfaction (using the World Values Survey) to find that, controlling for a host of other common predictors of life satisfaction, respondents are more satisfied with their lives as the degree of government intervention into the economy increases. We also find that all citizens, rich and poor alike, report higher levels of life satisfaction as the degree of government intervention into the economy increases and interpret this as strong evidence that government public policy decisions have an important effect on citizens’ quality of life.

Investigates differential policy representation based on citizens’ household incomes and finds that citizens with low incomes receive little substantive political representation (compared to more affluent citizens) in the policy decisions made by their state governments. This unequal policy representation occurs for both the general liberalism of state policies and on specific social issues like the death penalty and abortion.

Finds that the political opinions of white citizens are better represented in the roll call votes of their legislators than the political opinions of African American citizens and that this inequality in representation is explained by the fact that African Americans are less likely to hold legislators accountable for shirking and less likely to know about their legislator’s voting record.