research.md

title	Research
permalink	/research/
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Publications

• Sorting for K-Street: Post-Employment Regulations and Wage Setting in Congress
  The Journal of Politics, 2025, 87(2):664-679
  
  Abstract

  While post-employment regulations are a common tool to slow the revolving door in government, little is known about their effectiveness and consequences. Using the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), I argue that policymakers strategically adjust their behaviors to maintain lucrative career options in the lobbying industry. HLOGA prohibited staffers-turned-lobbyists who earn at least 75% of a Congress member's salary from contacting their ex-employers in Congress for one year. Using data on the complete set of congressional staff (2001-2016), I show that staffers sort below the salary threshold post-HLOGA. Employing various panel data analyses, I also find that selecting out of the regulation increases a staffer's probability to become a lobbyist and ensures a substantial premium in revenues at the beginning of their lobbying career. These results explain why reforms of the revolving door fail and provide insights on institutional determinants of career incentives for non-elected public officials.
  
  article
  appendix
  replication



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	<b>Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation, Inference and Validation Resources for 157 Languages</b><br>
	<i>with <a href="http://prodriguezsosa.com/">Pedro L. Rodriguez</a>, <a href="https://arthurspirling.org/">Arthur Spirling</a>, and <a href="https://bstewart.scholar.princeton.edu/">Brandon M. Stewart</a></i><br>
	<i>Political Analysis, 2025, 33(2):156-163</i><br>
	<i style="color: #ac4142;">2022 PolMeth Best Poster Award</i><br>
	<details>
<summary>Abstract</summary>
Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain high quality embeddings for non-English languages, and it may be computational expensive to do so.  In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, but this is non-trivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources designed to ameliorate the union of these issues: (1) a new version of <tt>fastText</tt> model embeddings, fit to Wikipedia corpora; (2) a multi-language "a la carte" (ALC) embedding version of the <tt>fastText</tt> model fit to Wikipedia corpora; (3) a multi-language ALC embedding version of the well-known <tt>GloVe</tt> model fit to Wikipedia corpora. These materials are aimed at "low resource" users who lack access to large corpora in their language of interest, or  who lack access to the computational resources required to produce high-quality vector representations. We make these resources available for 30 languages, along with a code pipeline for another 127 languages available from Wikipedia corpora.  We provide extensive validation of the materials, via reconstruction tests and some translation proofs-of-concept.  We also conduct and report on human crowdworker tests, for our embeddings for Arabic, French, (traditional, Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and  Spanish.  <br>

article
appendix
resources
replication



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	<b>Bureaucratic Resistance and Policy Inefficiency</b><br>
	<i>with <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/kun-heo/home">Kun Heo</a></i><br>
	<i>American Political Science Review, 2026</i><br>
	<details>
<summary>Abstract</summary> 
Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance prevents beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and induces ineffective reforms by providing bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability. <br>
</details>
	<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/bureaucratic-resistance-and-policy-inefficiency/54173A69645DE1B124A14219471A0B65"><div class="color-button">article</div></a><a href="https://elisawirsching.github.io/research/resistance_inefficiency_SI.pdf"><div class="color-button">appendix</div></a>
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	<b>Political Power of Bureaucratic Agents: Evidence from Policing in New York City</b><br>
	<i>Journal of Politics, 2026</i><br>
	<details>
<summary>Abstract</summary>
To what extent can bureaucrats manipulate public service provision for explicitly political ends? A growing body of work highlights the immense ability of bureaucrats to influence governments through campaign contributions, endorsements, collective bargaining, and organized election turnout. I explore a more fundamental mechanism of bureaucratic influence: bureaucrats strategically shirking responsibilities. Politicians depend on bureaucrats to achieve policy goals. This gives the latter leverage over the former. If bureaucrats deviate in their preferences from politicians and are organized in cohesive unions with strong tenure protections, they can collectively reduce effort to exert political pressure. I use data on New York Police Department (NYPD) 911 response times together with council members' preferences on the FY2021 $1 billion cut to the NYPD's budget. Employing difference-in-differences and spatial difference-in-discontinuities designs, I find that police reduced effort in districts of non-aligned politicians by slowing response times. This study informs the theoretical debate on principal-agent relationships in government and highlights the importance of organized political interests to explain policing in US cities.  <br>
</details>
	<a href="https://elisawirsching.github.io/research/policeresistance.pdf"><div class="color-button">article</div></a><a href="https://elisawirsching.github.io/research/policeresistance_SI.pdf"><div class="color-button">appendix</div></a><a href="https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/7HO1HR"><div class="color-button">replication</div></a>
	</li><br>

Working Papers

• Barriers to Representation: Selection Processes and Political Diversity in US Urban Bureaucracy
  2024 Best Paper Award, APSA Urban and Local Politics Section
  
  Abstract

  A rich body of research emphasizes the importance of a representative bureaucracy for public service provision, and reveals significant gaps in the representation of partisan and racial groups in street-level bureaucracies. What drives such misrepresentation across and within agencies in professionalized local bureaucracies? Using a unique dataset that tracks the characteristics and career trajectories of over 300,000 bureaucrats in New York City, this study presents three key findings. First, there is notable sorting across agencies, with the police, fire, and sanitation departments exhibiting a strong Republican, white, and male predominance. Second, focusing specifically on recruitment at the NYPD, I find that despite minimal disparities in both representation and qualification among exam-takers, Republican and White candidates are more likely to get hired. Counterfactual analyses indicate that equalizing hiring rates across demographic groups could increase the recruitment of underrepresented groups by up to 57%. Third, once hired, Republican and White officers are also more likely to be promoted, receive more departmental awards, and enjoy longer tenures compared to their non-White and Democratic counterparts. By offering new evidence on the determinants and institutional context of bureaucratic representation, this study calls for a more nuanced understanding of how and when it impacts governance outcomes.
  
  pdf

Works in Progress

• State Coercion and the Political Mobilization of US Teachers
  with Roxanne Rahnama and Tyler Simko
  



<li>
	<b>The Political Consequences of Police Slowdowns</b><br>
	<i>with <a href="https://www.arvindkrish.com/">Arvind Krishnamurthy</a> and <a href="https://www.dviryogev.com/">Dvir Yogev</a></i><br>
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