Research
The Urban Politics Lab uses original data collection, experimental design, and descriptive inference to address foundational questions in urban politics: What trade-offs shape public views on policing? Why do some communities resist new housing? Do cities respond to their residents? How does institutional racism influence local governance? How do voters evaluate candidates?
We conduct empirical research across five core areas: Discriminatory Institutions & Historical Redress, Local Government Accountability & Responsiveness; Local Elections & Candidate Emergence; Policing, Oversight & Public Safety; Housing & Land-Use Politics.
Discriminatory Institutions & Historical Redress
This program documents racially exclusionary local laws and examines whether confronting historical injustices alters public opinion on reparative policy.
Racial Threat and the Emergence of Discriminatory Ordinances Bryant J. Moy
Where and why are discriminatory ordinances adopted? Theories of racial threat suppose that members of a racial majority group regard the presence of minorities as a threat to their socio-political status and implement policies to hurt that minority population. I use the racial threat hypothesis to examine the adoption of criminal activity nuisance ordinances (or crime-free housing laws). These ordinances allow officials to designate specific properties and residents as nuisances after repeated police interactions. After that designation, property owners are penalized with fines or the seizure of property if they do not respond by removing the residents. Using data from Ohio municipalities, I find that the racial composition of cities predicts the emergence of criminal activity nuisance ordinances. I attempt to rule out alternative hypotheses surrounding the proportion of renter-occupied housing, crime, and poverty. In further exploring the results, I use a machine learning technique called Random Forests to uncover the discontinuity or “tipping point” where the propensity for adopting such a policy sharply increases or decreases. This research speaks to the generalizability of the racial threat hypothesis, the importance of representation, and the nation's diversification.
Read the paper here.
Criminal Activity Nuisance Ordinance (CANO) Database Bryant J. Moy Michele Valinoti
Builds a national dataset on nuisance ordinances to evaluate their content, spread, and racialized enforcement.
Can Knowledge of Racially Restrictive Covenants Increase Support for Redress? Bryant J. Moy Geneva Cole
Historical housing discrimination -- specifically through racially restrictive housing covenants -- has played a central role in shaping the racial wealth gap in the United States. We test whether providing historical information about racially restrictive covenants, with or without racial visual cues, increases support for reparative measures among White Americans. In a preregistered survey experiment with approximately 5,000 White respondents, participants were randomly assigned to a pure control, a neutral housing control, or one of three restrictive covenant treatments: text only, text with a Black family image, or text with a White family image. The text-only restrictive covenant treatment increased support for reparations by 7.0 points (p < 0.001) on a 0–100 scale relative to the pure control. The text plus Black family image and the text plus White family image produced increases of 7.4 points (p < 0.001) and 5.6 points (p < 0.001), respectively. The difference between the Black family and White family image treatments was positive but not statistically significant (1.9 points, p = 0.23). Related indices (racial justice policy and white guilt) show smaller or less consistent effects. These findings indicate that factual information about racially restrictive housing covenants is sufficient to increase White support for reparations, while racial imagery may provide a minimal additional persuasive benefit. This project contributes to research on public opinion, local discrimination, and reparative policy.
Local Government Accountability & Responsiveness
We examine whether—and how—cities and counties translate citizen preferences into concrete action. This work focuses on responsiveness within fragmented institutions and bureaucratic transparency.
Responsiveness in the Patchwork of Local Government Bryant J. Moy
Given a patchwork system of overlapping local institutions, can residents direct public policy? Current approaches to representation at the local level may present a distorted view of how democracy operates because they fail to account for the overlapping nature of institutions. To address this gap, I first implement a framework that incorporates multiple overlapping governing institutions: cities, counties, school districts, and special districts. Second, I use data from more than 500,000 survey responses to estimate a novel measure of local ideological preferences for cities over time. Finally, to assess the impact of ideology on public policy outcomes, I use a Bayesian within-between random effects model. This methodology yields three major findings. First, I demonstrate that cross-sectional responsiveness exists. Second, I find evidence for dynamic responsiveness in spending but inconclusive evidence for taxation. Third, I provide descriptive evidence that consolidated governance fosters greater responsiveness. I reframe the responsiveness discussion from a single governing unit to a holistic system of overlapping institutions and provide the strongest evidence to date that local governments respond dynamically to the ideology of citizens.
Political Ideology in the Local Context: Does self-placement ideology map onto local policy issues? Bryant J. Moy
Does ideology operate in similar ways at the national and local levels? The current debate about the existence of responsiveness at the local level rests on the answer to this descriptive question. Previous studies suggest that non-ideological factors are the main drivers of local politics, while more recent research has highlighted the impact of mass/aggregate ideology on local government policies. However, the relationship between ideology and local governance is not well understood, as previous research may have conflated local-level preferences (national views disaggregated to the local level) with local-government preferences (attitudes about cities, counties, and school districts). This short article examines the relevance of self-placement ideology to local politics research. To address this issue, we conducted a survey of Americans to assess how self-placement ideology reflects individual attitudes on local taxation and spending at various levels of government (city, county, school district, and federal). Our results indicate that self-placement ideology is a measure of residents' general preferences on taxation and spending, applicable across levels of government.
Can Social Pressure Foster Responsiveness? An Open Records Field Experiment with Mayoral Offices Bryant J. Moy
This paper examines the extent to which social pressures can foster greater responsiveness among public officials. I conduct a non-deceptive field experiment on 1400 city executives across all 50 states and measure their level of responsiveness to open records requests. I use two messages to prime social pressure. The first treatment centers on the norm and duty to be responsive to the public’s request for transparency. The second treatment is grounded in the peer effect literature, which suggests that individuals change their behavior in the face of potential social sanctioning and accountability. I find no evidence that mayors are affected by priming the officials’ duty to the public. The mayors who received the peer effects prime were 6–8 percentage points less likely to respond, which suggests a “backfire effect.”
Moy, Bryant J. 2021. “Can Social Pressure Foster Responsiveness?” An Open Records Field Experiment with Mayoral Offices. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 8(2), 117–127.
Read the paper here.
Local Elections & Candidate Emergence
This program explores who runs for local office, who wins, and how voters evaluate candidate attributes—especially rootedness and identity.
Does Segregation Produce Local Political Leaders? Evidence from White Ethnic Enclaves Bryant J. Moy Luca Vitale
Why do some ethnic groups produce local political leaders while others do not? While previous research emphasizes demographic representation and general segregation patterns, we argue that the spatial distribution of ethnic groups within cities plays a role in candidate emergence. We theorize that ethnic enclaves - geographic clustering of co-ethnic populations and supportive institutions - facilitate political leadership by reducing mobilization costs, enabling claims for targeted public goods, and fostering dense social networks. Ethnic enclaves differ from general patterns of segregation by combining geographic clustering in space with self-sustaining institutions, businesses, and social networks. To test this theory, we examine white ethnic enclaves in U.S. cities, developing a novel measurement approach that combines machine learning classification of candidates' ethnic ancestry with a spatial measure of ethnic enclaves. Using data from 638 cities over five decades, we find that higher levels of ethnic clustering significantly increase both the emergence and electoral success of co-ethnic candidates, particularly in city council races. This effect persists after controlling for demographic share and is robust across multiple specifications. Importantly, this relationship is nonlinear -- the effect of clustering becomes most pronounced once ethnic groups reach a threshold level of spatial concentration. In addition, the relationship is especially pronounced when ethnic groups exhibit strong internal social ties, suggesting the importance of community networks. Our findings demonstrate that spatial concentration, beyond simple population share, shapes pathways to local political leadership. This research contributes to our understanding of ethnic politics and local representation by highlighting how geographic clustering influences political mobilization and candidate emergence.
Read the paper here.
Hometown Advantage: Voter Preferences for Community Embeddedness in Local Contests Bryant J. Moy
Every year, Americans elect hundreds of thousands of candidates to local public office, typically in low-attention, nonpartisan races. How do voters evaluate candidates in these sorts of elections? Previous research suggests that, absent party cues, voters rely on a set of heuristic shortcuts—including the candidate’s name, profession, and interest group endorsements—to decide whom to support. In this paper, we suggest that community embeddedness—a candidate’s roots and ties to the community—is particularly salient in these local contests. We present evidence from a conjoint survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American voters. We estimate the marginal effect on vote share of candidate attributes such as gender, race, age, profession, interest group endorsements, and signals of community embeddedness— specifically homeownership and residency duration. We find that voters, regardless of political party, have strong preferences for community embeddedness. Strikingly, the magnitude of the residency duration effect rivals that of prior political experience.
Ornstein, Joseph T., Amanda J. Heideman, Bryant J. Moy, and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff. 2024. “Hometown Advantage: Voter Preferences for Community Embeddedness in Local Contests.” Journal of Experimental Political Science: 1–15.
Read the paper here.
Policing, Oversight & Public Safety
We study how institutional design and the consequences of policing policy shape public trust, support, and trade-off decision-making.
The Double-Edged Sword of Policing: The Impact of Policing Consequences on Attitudes Bryant J. Moy
Police expansion poses a double-edged sword: homicides may decline, saving lives, yet petty crime enforcement disproportionately targets minority communities. We argue that Black and White Americans differ in support for additional officers because each group assigns different weight to policing's protective benefits and coercive costs. Using a preregistered survey experiment, we examine whether informational frames emphasizing homicide reductions, petty-offense arrests, or both shift public opinion on police expansion. Information about homicide reduction produces positive but small and imprecise effects among White respondents while unexpectedly decreasing support among Black respondents. The petty crime treatment significantly reduces support across all respondents, with Black Americans demonstrating substantially larger negative shifts. When both consequences are presented simultaneously, support declines for all groups, with Black Americans again showing the strongest opposition. These findings demonstrate that coercive considerations dominate protective benefits in shaping attitudes, particularly among Black Americans who perceive police expansion as an bundle of consequences. The results help explain why communities experiencing both under-protection and over-policing resist binary expand-or-defund policy choices and expose fundamental challenges for policing reform in unequal multiracial democracies.
Does Civilian Oversight Impact Police Legitimacy? Bryant J. Moy
Does instilling external oversight over policing result in enhanced public perceptions of police legitimacy? Civilian review boards (CRBs) are frequently promoted as mechanisms to enhance the legitimacy of police agencies by providing independent oversight. Despite public support for CRBs, their adoption and effectiveness remain limited, raising concerns about their actual impact on procedural fairness and police legitimacy. This study assesses the role of CRBs in shaping public perceptions by examining various decision-making scenarios involving police chiefs and CRBs. Using a survey experiment fielded to 2,503 respondents, we investigate whether CRBs enhance legitimacy when they either coincide with or conflict with police chiefs' determinations in cases of officer misconduct. Our findings suggest that while CRBs may enhance perceptions of procedural fairness for some, particularly those with negative views of police, their involvement does not universally increase legitimacy. In fact, when CRBs conflict with police chiefs, they may diminish public trust in both policing and civilian oversight. These results provide empirical evidence to support concerns that CRBs might not fulfill their intended role in enhancing police legitimacy, especially in cases of institutional disagreement.
We investigate political and attitudinal drivers of support or opposition to housing development, zoning, and affordability reforms.
Housing & Land-Use Politics
Anti-Landlord Bias and Housing Attitudes: How Anti-Landlord Sentiment Shapes Support for Housing Development Bryant J. Moy Luchuan Deng
Anti-development coalitions often invoke market skepticism to oppose new housing construction, but market actors in housing have conflicting interests. While existing research focuses on neighborhood character and developer profits as drivers of Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) opposition, we argue that opposition depends on which economic actors citizens view as beneficiaries. Developers profit from construction, but landlords profit from scarcity. This creates a potential wedge between anti-market sentiment and housing opposition. We test this theory using a survey experiment (N=3,000) that randomly assigns respondents to six conditions: control, neighborhood character concerns, developer profit concerns, and three frames about how landlords benefit from housing scarcity through exploitation, scarcity profiteering, and wealth transfers. This research identifies landlords as distinct political actors whose interests in economic rents conflict with both developers and renters. We examine whether anti-landlord sentiment can increase support for housing development by reframing new construction as a constraint on rent-seeking rather than an enabler of it. This study contributes to understanding how economic narratives shape policy preferences, the political economy of housing markets, and potential strategies for building pro-development coalitions.