Stan Oklobdzija

Stan Oklobdzija

Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Tulane University.

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publications

Closing Down and Cashing In: Extremism and Political Fundraising

Published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly, 2017

Can politically polarizing events bear dividends for extremist lawmakers? Evidence from California legislative financial disclosures suggests they can. During the state’s numerous budget shutdowns of the last 30 years, extremist legislators outside their party median could expect greater fund-raising hauls than their more centrist counterparts. The results suggest that polarizing events such as California’s perennial budget impasses can make extremist positions more appealing to the polarized political elites who generally fund political campaigns. Regardless of the motivation, however, these results suggest a strong incentive to prolong political discord by extremists—a troubling outcome in cases where supermajority votes are required.

Recommended citation: Oklobdzija, S. (2017). Closing Down and Cashing In: Extremism and Political Fundraising. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 17(2), 201–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532440016679373 http://stanokl.github.io/files/stano_sppq.pdf

When Campaigns Call, Who Answers? Using Observational Data to Enrich our Understanding of Phone Mobilization.

Published in Electoral Studies, 2019

For decades, campaigns have used phone calls to move voters to the polls. Political scientists have made great strides using field experiments to study whether campaign calls effectively increase turnout. However, due in part to limited access to observational data, some of the most basic questions about this mobilization strategy have gone overlooked. In this paper, we take a step back to provide a rich descriptive analysis of a novel dataset of millions of campaign phone calls made in California during the 2016 election. We use this dataset to shed light on three important questions: Whom do campaigns call? When campaigns call, who answers? Are those who answer more likely to turn out to vote? Our analysis reveals patterns consistent with previous theories, but also sheds light on new patterns. For example, we find that about two-thirds of campaign calls are to landlines, but those who are called on a mobile phone are twice as likely to answer. We conclude by using a matching analysis to examine the relationship between answering the phone and turning out to vote. We find that those who answer the phone are 5.9–6.8 percentage points more likely to turn out to vote. The rich descriptive analysis included in this paper provides empirical validation of prior theories of campaign mobilization, and opens avenues for future field experiment research.

Recommended citation: Abrajano, M., Carlson, T. N., Bedolla, L. G., Oklobdzija, S., & Turney, S. (2019). When campaigns call, who answers? Using observational data to enrich our understanding of phone mobilization. Electoral Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.03.001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379418304219

Public Positions, Private Giving: Dark Money and Political Donors in the Digital Age

Published in Research and Politics, 2019

Dark money—campaign funds raised by 501(c)(4) designated non-profit corporations whose donors are exempt from disclosure—has become an increasingly large fraction of outside spending in American elections at both the state and the federal level. This paper makes use of the only publicly available donor list for a dark money group in existence today—that of “Americans for Job Security,” who contributed $11 million to two conservative-leaning ballot initiative campaigns in California during the 2012 elections. In comparing the ideological scores of donors of this dark money group to traditional donors to the two conservative propositions, I find a strong liberal tilt of donors to Americans for Job Security—indicating a social pressures motivation behind concealing one’s donation via a dark money group. These results also show disclosure laws have an effect on a donor’s calculus to contribute to a political cause.

Recommended citation: Oklobdzija, S. (2019). Public positions, private giving: Dark money and political donors in the Digital Age. Research & Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019832475 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168019832475

Diagnosing Gender Bias in Image Recognition Systems

Published in Socius, 2020

Image recognition systems offer the promise to learn from images at scale without requiring expert knowledge. However, past research suggests that machine learning systems often produce biased output. In this article, we evaluate potential gender biases of commercial image recognition platforms using photographs of U.S. members of Congress and a large number of Twitter images posted by these politicians. Our crowdsourced validation shows that commercial image recognition systems can produce labels that are correct and biased at the same time as they selectively report a subset of many possible true labels. We find that images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance. Moreover, women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men. We discuss how encoded biases such as these affect the visibility of women, reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, and limit the validity of the insights that can be gathered from such data.

Recommended citation: Schwemmer C, Knight C, Bello-Pardo ED, Oklobdzija S, Schoonvelde M, Lockhart JW. 2020. Diagnosing Gender Bias in Image Recognition Systems. Socius. doi:10.1177/2378023120967171 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023120967171

Do Male and Female Legislators Have Different Twitter Communication Styles?

Published in State Politics and Policy Quarterly, 2023

Communication is a fundamental step in the process of political representation, and an influential stream of research hypothesizes that male and female politicians talk to their constituents in very different ways. To build the broad dataset necessary for this analysis, we harness the massive trove of communication by American politicians through Twitter. We adopt a supervised learning approach that begins with the hand coding of over 10,000 tweets and then use these to train machine learning algorithms to categorize the full corpus of over three million tweets sent by the lower house state legislators who were serving in the summer of 2017. Our results provide insights into politicians’ behavior and the consequence of women’s underrepresentation on what voters learn about legislative activity.

Recommended citation: Butler, Daniel M., Thad Kousser, and Stan Oklobdzija. 2023. “Do Male and Female Legislators Have Different Twitter Communication Styles?” State Politics & Policy Quarterly: 1–23. doi: 10.1017/spq.2022.16. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/dark-parties-unveiling-nonparty-communities-in-american-political-campaigns/9576CD955EE490DD6555439FC1E34E71](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/state-politics-and-policy-quarterly/article/do-male-and-female-legislators-have-different-twitter-communication-styles/7DA632E453AD9A924FE9DD42A315B112)

Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns.

Published in The American Political Science Review, 2023

Since 2010, independent expenditures have grown as a source of spending in American elections. A large and growing portion comes from “dark money” groups—political nonprofits whose terms of incorporation allow them to partially obscure their sources of income. I develop a new dataset of about 2,350,000 tax documents released by the IRS and use it to test a new theory of political spending. I posit that pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties. Akin to networked party organizations discovered by other scholars, these dark money networks channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups. I further show that accounting for these dark money networks makes previously peripheral nodes more important to the larger network and diminishes the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.

Recommended citation: OKLOBDZIJA, STAN. 2023. “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns.” American Political Science Review: 1–22. doi: 10.1017/S0003055423000187. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/dark-parties-unveiling-nonparty-communities-in-american-political-campaigns/9576CD955EE490DD6555439FC1E34E71

What State Housing Policies Do Voters Want? Evidence from a Platform-Choice Experiment.

Published in Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2024

How much has rising political attention to problems of housing affordability translated into support for market-rate housing development? A tacit assumption of YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) activists is that more public attention to housing affordability will engender more support for their policy agenda of removing regulatory barriers to dense market-rate housing. Yet recent research finds that the mass public has little conviction that more housing supply would improve affordability, which in turn raises questions about the depth of public support for supply-side policies relative to price controls, demand subsidies, or restrictions on “Wall Street” investors, to name a few. In a national survey of 5,000 urban and suburban voters, we elicited perceptions of the efficacy of a wide range of potential state policies for “helping people get housing they can afford.” We also asked respondents whether they support various housing and non-housing policies. Finally, as a way of estimating the revealed importance of housing-policy preferences relative to the more conventional grist of state politics, we elicited preferences over randomized, three-policy platforms. In a set of results that recall the politics of the inflation-ridden 1970s, we find that homeowners and renters alike support price controls, demand subsidies, restrictions on Wall Street buyers, and subsidized affordable housing. The revealed-preference results further suggest, contrary to our expectations, that price controls and anti “Wall Street” restrictions are very important to voters. Contrary to the recommendations of housing economists and other experts, allowing more market-rate housing is regarded as ineffective and draws only middling levels of public support. Opponents of market-rate housing development also care more about the issue than do supporters. Finally, we show that people who claim that housing is very important to them do not have distinctive housing-policy preferences.

Recommended citation: Elmendorf, Christopher, Clayton Nall and Stan Oklobdzija. 2024. "What State Housing Policies Do Voters Want? Evidence from a Platform-Choice Experiment", Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy: Vol. 5: No. 1, pp 117-152. https://nowpublishers.com/article/Details/PIP-0096

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