Research

My dissertation explores how organized interests are (and are not) able to influence the federal rulemaking process through notice and comment rulemaking. Using a combination of text analysis methodology on a corpus of over 800 rules and a case study of rulemaking at the Securities and Exchange Commission, I show how commenters have limited influence over proposed rules and how the notice and comment process biases policymaking in favor of the status quo. 

Alexander Love, Michael Greenberger, Ye Wang, Frank Baumgartner (2024). Distracted Partners: Why Police Traffic Enforcement is Inefficient. Forthcoming at Policy Studies Journal

As communities throughout the country adopt Vision Zero policies designed to reduce traffic fatalities to their lowest possible numbers, they rely heavily on police for traffic enforcement. Within policing communities, however, traffic stops are seen not only as a means to encourage better driving, but also as an important tool for drug interdiction and crime control. This renders the police “distracted partners” in the fight against dangerous driving. We analyze over 230,000 stops conducted by the San Diego Police Department using geolocated traffic-stop data. We compare a model of traffic stops where they are driven by injury-causing crashes to models where the stops are associated with crime and minority population. We find that the police are attentive to crashes, but more driven by crime and minority population levels. We conclude that traffic safety efforts could more effectively be enhanced by a non-police agency devoted solely to reducing serious crashes, fatalities, and the public health threats from cars, with the police focused on crime control.  The combined mission for the police of doing traffic safety and crime control results in suboptimal outcomes with regards to crash and injury prevention.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, Sarah Treul, Alexander Love (2023). Understanding Uncontested Prosecutor Elections. American Criminal Law Review [Link]

Prosecutors are very powerful players in the criminal justice system. One of the few checks on their power is their periodic obligation to stand for election. But very few prosecutor elections are contested, and even fewer are competitive. As a result, voters are not able to hold prosecutors accountable for their decisions. The problem with uncontested elections has been widely recognized, but little understood. The legal literature has lamented the lack of choice for voters, but any suggested solutions have been based on only anecdote or simple descriptive analyses of election data. Using a logistic regression analysis, this Article estimates the individual effects of a number of variables on prosecutor elections. It finds that several factors that have been previously identified as contributing to an uncontested election are not, in fact, what drives uncontested elections for prosecutors. Instead, the factors with the largest effect are whether an incumbent runs and the population of the district. It also identifies two features of state election law that contribute to the dearth of contested elections. The Article concludes by noting that these factors suggest specific policy changes that could help to increase the number of contested and competitive elections-thus ensuring that voters can help guide important criminal justice decisions in their communities.

​Frank R Baumgartner, Tamira Daniely, Kalley Huang, Sydney Johnson, Alexander Love, Lyle May, Patrice Mcgloin, Allison Swagert, Niharika Vattikonda, Kamryn Washington (2021). Throwing away the key: the unintended consequences of “tough-on-crime” laws. Perspectives on Politics. [Link]

During the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. policymakers adopted draconian criminal justice polices including widespread use of extremely long sentences, including life without parole. The country is now coming to face the consequences of these policies: a new class of geriatric prisoners posing little threat to public safety as they age into their seventies and beyond. Using a perspective drawn from bounded rationality, framing, and agenda-setting, we recount how policymakers adopted these policies, with key blind spots relating to obvious consequences of these harsh laws. We show how political leaders can over-respond to a perceived public policy crisis, particularly when powerful frames of race, fear, and dehumanization come to dominate the public discourse. We show how these trends are radically changing the demographics and needs of prison populations through a chronological review, mathematical simulation of the prison population, review of statistics about prison population, and personal stories illustrating these themes drawn from inside prison.

Alexander Love (2024). Status Quo Bias in Federal Rulemaking.

​Commentators express great concern about affluent organizations having undue influence over public policy, especially with regard to bureaucratic rulemaking. However, studies probing his question often fail to quantify the influence of these powerful actors. In this study, I emphasize the importance of considering the status quo when analyzing regulatory change. Most rule proposals are not isolated actions, but rather, attempts to modify existing policy paradigms. This paper identifies the status quo policy for over 800 bureaucratic rules spanning 2017 to 2023, employing text analysis to quantify both the initially proposed changes by agencies and the alterations finalized after the comment period. I find that changes made after the comment period account for a small percentage of overall changes to U.S. regulations and that in the most significant cases, they predominately move the proposed policy closer to the status quo. These results highlight the critical role played by the stages in the rulemaking process that precede and follow the public notice and comment period, and their consequential impacts on policy outcomes.

Michael Greenberger, Alexander Love (2024). On the Wrong Side of the Line: Evidence of Place-based Bias in Policing. Under Review

Consistent and well-documented racial disparities in policing are often conceived of as being the product of an interaction between individual officer-level racial bias and the race of the person being stopped. We investigate whether place-based bias exists in policing by comparing police behavior cross-sectionally across beat boundaries. We analyze over two million traffic stops from San Diego, California, and Nashville, Tennessee and find that police engage in more crime-prevention behavior in certain beats and that these behaviors are associated with the racial demographics of the beat, not the level of crime or demand for service. We then use a geographic discontinuity design to determine whether racially disparate treatment of drivers arises exclusively in response to neighborhood characteristics or if disparities exist at the administrative unit-level. —we find evidence that place-based bias exists at the beat level. Examining stops that happen close to beat borders, we show that officers behave quite differently on one side of a beat as opposed to the other, evidence that place-based bias exists at the beat level. These differences in behavior correspond with the racial makeup of a beat: beats with higher minority populations are subjected to more aggressive policing.