Welcome. I am the 15th President and CEO of the Social Science Research Council. I am also Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Data Science, Affiliated Professor of Law, and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University. I am Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Expert Panel.

My CV can be downloaded here. My email is anna [dot] harvey [at] nyu. Twitter is [at]annalilharvey and [at]publicsafetylab. My mailing address is Department of Politics, New York University, 19 W. 4th St., New York, NY 10012. My office number is 308.

I founded the Public Safety Lab in June 2017 to provide data science and social science support for more equitable and efficient criminal justice practices. The Public Safety Lab works with communities, law enforcement agencies, and researchers to design and test strategies that increase both equity and efficiency in criminal justice outcomes.

In the Public Safety Lab’s Prosecutorial Reform Initiative, supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Arnold Ventures, our team is working with several large district attorney’s offices to understand the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution. Misdemeanor cases make up over 80 percent of the cases processed by the U.S. criminal justice system, yet we know little about the causal impacts of misdemeanor prosecution. Our article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics reports the first estimates of the causal effects of misdemeanor prosecution on defendants’ subsequent criminal justice involvement. We leverage the as-if random assignment of nonviolent misdemeanor cases to Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) who decide whether a case should be prosecuted in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. These ADAs vary in the average leniency of their prosecution decisions. We find that, for the marginal defendant, nonprosecution of a nonviolent misdemeanor offense leads to a 53% reduction in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint and to a 60% reduction in the number of new criminal complaints over the next two years. These local average treatment effects are largest for defendants without prior criminal records, suggesting that averting criminal record acquisition is an important mechanism driving our findings. We also present evidence that a recent policy change in Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had similar beneficial effects, decreasing the likelihood of subsequent criminal justice involvement. We are exploring the robustness of our findings to data from multiple offices.

In a second project through the Prosecutorial Reform Initiative, we have estimated the impacts of the election of reform prosecutors on crime rates. These prosecutors have implemented reforms such as scaling back the prosecution of nonviolent misdemeanors, diverting defendants to treatment programs instead of punishment, and recommending against cash bail for defendants who might otherwise be detained pretrial. Such policies are controversial, and many worry that they could increase crime by reducing deterrent and incapacitation effects. We used variation in the timing of when these prosecutors took office, across 35 jurisdictions, to measure the effect of their policies on reported crime rates. While our estimates are imprecisely estimated, we found no significant effects of these reforms on local crime rates.

Through the Public Safety Lab’s Jail Data Initiative, made possible by the generous support of Arnold Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for Data Science at New York University, and the Proteus Fund, we are collecting daily individual-level records from over 1,300 county jails. There are over 3,000 jails in the U.S., and they process approximately 11 million bookings every year. Yet there are virtually no data on county jail detainees. Many of these jails post their daily jail rosters online. We are scraping these daily rosters and creating a daily booking-level database of these records. We have also identified counties that provide online access to criminal case records, are scraping these records, and are merging them at the individual level with the jail roster data. We are using these data to explore questions about the impacts of pretrial detention practices on defendant outcomes, and are also sharing the data both with other research teams and with nonprofit organizations, including the Council on Criminal Justice, The Bail Project, the Prison Policy Initiative, and the Marshall Project. Links to the data, and to maps, plots, and reports using those data, may be found on the Jail Data Initiative’s website.

In the first research paper to use the Jail Data Initiative data, we leverage new data on daily individual-level jail records and exploit the timing of incarceration to estimate the causal effects of jail incarceration on voting from jail in 2020. We find that registered voters booked into county jails for the full duration of 2020 voting days were on average 41% less likely to vote in 2020, relative to registered voters booked into the same jails within 7 — 42 days after Election Day. Black registered voters booked into county jails for the full duration of 2020 voting days were on average 68% less likely to vote in 2020, relative to Black registered voters booked into the same jails after Election Day. Jail incarceration also reduces voter registration from jail, resulting in an even larger total effect of incarceration on voting from jail. Our findings reveal the pressing need to enable voting-eligible incarcerated individuals to exercise their constitutional right to vote, and to address racial disparities in the effect of jail incarceration on the exercise of that right.

In a Public Safety Lab project on racial disparities in policing, we analyzed the impacts of the litigation of law enforcement agencies for racially discriminatory employment practices. In an article published in the Journal of Urban Economics, we looked at the effects of the litigation of of law enforcement agencies for racially discriminatory employment practices on crime victimization, by race of victim. Black Americans are substantially less safe than white Americans, with persistently higher risks of crime victimization. One possible cause of racial disparities in crime victimization may lie in racially disparate law enforcement responses to crime experienced by Black and white victims. We leverage idiosyncratic variation in the litigation of law enforcement agencies for racially discriminatory employment practices to identify changes in the nature of the police response to Black crime victimization. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey between 1979 and 2004, and a series of estimators appropriate for difference-in-differences designs with staggered treatment, we find that litigation over racially discriminatory employment practices in law enforcement agencies decreased Black crime victimization by magnitudes ranging between 24 – 27%, but had no discernible impacts on white crime victimization, reducing the pretreatment racial gap in crime victimization by 73 – 82%. Decreases in Black crime victimization appear in the first year after litigation onset, consistent with efforts by litigated departments to address racial disparities in the police response to reported crime.

In my non-Public Safety Lab work I have recently co-authored a casebook on judicial decision-making, Judicial Decision-Making: A Coursebook (West Academic Publishing, 2020), with Andrew Martin (Washington University St. Louis), Tom Clark (Emory), Maggie Lemos (Duke Law), Allison Larsen (William and Mary Law), and Barry Friedman (NYU Law). The casebook integrates both social science and legal approaches to understanding how judges decide cases.

Another recent project, joint with Emily A. West (Political Science, University of Pittsburgh), investigates discrimination in public accommodations. Identification difficulties have to date precluded the estimation of causal effects from statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. We leverage the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1883 strike of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, along with ex ante variation in state-level statutes, to identify the impact of a federal statute protecting access to public accommodations. Using repeated geo-located medical exams of Union Army and U.S. Colored Troops veterans, and a series of geographic regression discontinuity and placebo designs, we find that the Court’s ruling led to large relative weight losses for USCT veterans in states without state-level public accommodation statutes. These findings suggest that, despite popular skepticism about the importance of discrimination in public accommodations, this form of discrimination in fact has material negative impacts on the well-being of its victims, and that statutes prohibiting such discrimination can mitigate these impacts.

A third project investigates the causal impact of money in elections. One article in this project uses the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to identify the causal impact of removing state limits on campaign spending. The Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence rests on a distinction between spending restrictions (generally struck) and contribution restrictions (often upheld). In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the case originating this distinction, the majority rejected an “anti-distortion” rationale for spending restrictions, claiming that campaign spending is merely an effect of candidate support, not a cause of candidate support. If this claim is true, then removing restrictions on campaign spending should have no discernible causal impacts. This article tests the Buckley majority’s empirical claim using its own ruling, which struck limits on campaign spending in state elections in 26 states. Estimates consistently suggest that the Buckley-induced removal of state limits on campaign spending led to increased Republican voteshares, increased Republican candidate entry, and decreased Democratic candidate entry in state legislative and gubernatorial elections in states affected by the ruling, and to both increased Republican House voteshares and the election of more conservative freshman Republican House incumbents in states both affected by the ruling and holding concurrent federal and state elections. These findings suggest that the rationale for the core distinction in the Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence has little empirical foundation.

Another campaign finance project, joint with Taylor Mattia (PhD student, NYU Department of Politics), looks at the causal impact of Citizens United v. FEC (2010) on legislators’ preferences. Recent work has suggested that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United (2010), eliminating restrictions on independent spending in elections, increased the probability of election of Republican state legislative candidates (Klumpp et al 2016). Left unexplored has been whether the Court’s ruling in Citizens United not only increased the number of Republican state legislators, but also induced the movement of state legislators’ preferences in a more conservative direction, net of any effects on Republican candidates’ probabilities of election. We attempt to distinguish these electoral and preference effects of Citizens United. Estimates consistently suggest that the Citizens United-induced removal of state restrictions on independent spending led not only to increased probabilities of election for Republican state legislative candidates, but also to larger within-district increases in the conservatism of state legislators’ preferences in formerly Democratic districts electing Republican state legislators post-ruling. These estimates, which are robust to a series of matching and placebo exercises, may provide support for the claim that an increased presence of money in elections has contributed to the increased conservatism of Republican elected officials. A discussion of this article hosted by the Business Scholarship Podcast may be found here.

Several of these projects involve applying the tools of causal inference to historical data. In an article published in a special issue of Public Choice devoted to causal inference and American political development (APD), I illustrate how regression discontinuity design (RDD) can be applied to three questions of interest to APD scholars of state capacity. First, the article illustrates the use of a geographic RDD to estimate the causal impacts of a Reconstruction-era federal civil rights statute during the period prior to the development of significant federal state capacity. Second, it explores the possible causes of the late 19th century decline in the use of monetary rewards to motivate civil servants by using a population-based RDD to estimate the causal impacts of financial incentives on law enforcement effort and civilian compliance. Third, it illustrates an opportunity to test claims about the impacts of the growth of the “carceral state” by applying a resource-constraint RDD to estimate the causal impacts of law enforcement effort on a variety of outcomes.

In The Civil Rights Cases (1883), Buckley v. Valeo (1976), and Citizens United (2010), unelected judges struck federal statutes enacted by legislative majorities; legislative supermajorities are required to overturn these rulings. In another project I investigate the historical origins of this form of “entrenched” judicial review. Among those current democracies that were former colonies, the presence of entrenched judicial review is strongly associated with pre-colonial histories of marked inequality, a finding consistent with the hypothesis that entrenched judicial review was adopted at least in part to preserve pre-colonial inequality from legislative redistribution.

Yet unelected judges are not necessarily unresponsive to legislative preferences. In the U.S., federal judges serve only on the condition of good behavior, and congressional majorities control judicial salaries, budgets, and jurisdiction. In A Mere Machine: The Supreme Court, Congress, and American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2013), I reported evidence indicating that, even in constitutional cases, the U.S. Supreme Court defers to congressional preferences, in particular to the preferences of majorities in the House of Representatives (the chamber that originates both impeachment and appropriations actions). To view an interview about A Mere Machine on CSPAN’s Book TV, click here.

In order to generate the findings reported in A Mere Machine, several methodological challenges had to be addressed. These challenges included constructing an objectively defined measure of the ideological direction of Supreme Court judgments, the initial work for which was done jointly with Michael J. Woodruff (former NYU Politics PhD student). They also included addressing the selection bias in the Court’s docket, the early work for which was done jointly with Barry Friedman (NYU Professor of Law) (here and here). Other work on the responsiveness of the Supreme Court to congressional preferences may be found here and here.

In earlier work I investigated the proposition that partisanship may be modeled as a social convention, providing social benefits to in-group members (and social penalties to out-group members). Electoral laws that make partisan acts more public (e.g. party registration) or less public (e.g. secret ballots; party primaries rather than caucuses) will then affect the ability of neighbors to coordinate on local party social conventions, a hypothesis for which there is empirical support.

This work on partisanship as a social convention grew out of my first major project, which investigated the competition to mobilize women’s votes after constitutional female suffrage. In Votes without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920-1970 (Cambridge University Press, Series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions, 1998), I suggested that, if there is a significant social component to turnout and partisanship, then competition to mobilize votes through social networks will be much like competition to mobilize consumers of services offered through networks (e.g., telephone networks). Markets for networked services are generally marked by imperfect competition, with early entrants having significant advantages over later entrants. Likewise, the decision by the National League of Women Voters (the former female suffrage organization) in 1923 to cede the market in women’s votes to the party organizations may have followed from its necessarily late entry into this imperfectly competitive market. Votes Without Leverage built on articles published here and here. A post on Vox in honor of the 100th anniversary of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 swearing-in as the first woman to join the House of Representatives may be found here.