Jake Alton Jares
Jake Alton Jares
Research Interests
- American Politics
- Political Economy
- Public Policy
- Quantitative Methodology
Publications
When individuals receive benefits from government programs, does it affect their attitudes toward those programs or toward government generally? A growing literature blends policy feedback theory and political behavior research to explore these questions, but so far it has focused almost exclusively on social policies such as the Affordable Care Act. In this article, we focus on a very different set of government programs that reach a more conservative, rural population: agricultural assistance. Our study ties administrative records on participation in USDA farm aid programs to an original, first-of-its-kind survey measuring agricultural producers’ political attitudes. We find that receiving agricultural assistance is sometimes related to producers’ views of the program delivering the benefits, but it depends on the divisiveness of the program and—for highly partisan programs—recipients’ ideology. However, receiving federal agricultural assistance is not associated with more positive views of government.
Working Papers
Scholars of policy feedback have emphasized the propensity of government programs to foster their own durability by creating constituencies that are motivated and empowered to defend their benefits. However, the vested interests in many longstanding policies are both electorally and economically marginal, and thus it is unclear what they might offer in exchange for continued patronage from legislators who are motivated by reelection or ideological concerns. I investigate these dynamics by unpacking a puzzle along these lines regarding the US farm safety net. Born out of the Great Depression, US farm programs have remained robustly intact throughout 18 successive reauthorization hurdles, despite consistent conservative opposition and an order-of-magnitude collapse in the relative economic stature of the farming sector. Drawing on population-scale administrative data and a natural experiment in farm program retrenchment, I argue that this resilience owes little to the votes and resources that program beneficiaries provide to legislators. Between the fundamental dispersion of crop production and the urban-rural partisan rift at the center of US geographic polarization, modern farmers are (a) electorally marginal in almost every congressional district, and (b) represented by conservative legislators who generally favor cuts to the broader social safety net. I hypothesize that the broad support farm programs nonetheless receive stems in large part from legislators’ intrinsic desire to support distinctly local enterprises. I corroborate this hypothesis through a quantitative case study of the disqualification—and eventual reinstatement—of cotton from the 2014 farm bill safety net due to a surprise World Trade Organization ruling. Altogether, the nature of farm programs’ political resilience suggests that political scientists may be too quick to assume that legislators deliver particularistic benefits to narrow economic interests because they are electorally significant, and I highlight the role that economic geography might play in directly shaping lawmakers’ policymaking objectives.
How does the extent of policy benefits–not simply their presence–affect political engagement? While fundamental to understanding the electoral implications of economic policymaking, addressing this question is challenging due to the difficulty of measuring individual voters’ policy outcomes. We examine a natural experiment embedded in President Trump’s Market Facilitation Program, which aided a core Republican constituency: farmers harmed by his 2018 trade war. Due to idiosyncrasies of program design, the MFP undercompensated some farmers for their trade war losses–and significantly overcompensated others–based solely on their 2018 crop portfolios. Analyzing over 165,000 affected voters, we show that improved compensation outcomes had negligible impacts on Republican farmers' midterm turnout and campaign contributions, even though such variation in benefits significantly affected farmers' propensity to view the intervention as helpful. This null result is important–our estimates suggest that even highly salient variation in policy outcomes may have limited mobilizing capacity.