Research Interests
Political economy, economics and politics of education, behavioral economics and politics, election administration

Contact Information
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Political Science
Visiting Lecturer
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E53-470
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Office Phone: 617-452-3689
Cell Phone: 650-387-7492
e-mail: mmeredit@mit.edu

Published or Forthcoming Papers

• The Strategic Timing of Direct Democracy. Economics and Politics, forthcoming.
  Replication Data
  
  
• Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2008. 105(26): 8846-8849.
  Joint with Jonah Berger and S. Christian Wheeler
  Previous Version Stanford GSB Working Paper 1926
  Replication Data
  

Working Papers

• On The Causes and Consequence of Ballot Order-Effects
  Joint with Yuval Salant
  Previous Version SIEPR Discussion Paper 6-29
  
  We investigate how ballot ordering influences who wins office in California city council and school board elections. We find that being listed first on the ballot increases a candidate’s likelihood of winning office by about five percentage points. This effect is robust to the presence of incumbents in the race and to whether statewide races are concurrently on the ballot. The magnitude of the first candidate affect increases the more candidates participating in the race. Candidates listed second perform significantly worse than candidates listed first in multi-winner elections, thus rejecting satisficing as the primary mechanism causing ballot-order effects.
  
  
• Persistence in Political Participation
  
  This paper uses discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past participation on subsequent participation decisionsand partisan identification. It compares participation decisions and partisan affiliations of individuals who turned eighteen just before past elections with those who turned eighteen just after. It presents three main findings. First, past presidential election eligibility increases the probability of subsequent participation. For example, I find that 2000 presidential election eligibility increased participation in the 2004 presidential election by 3.0 to 4.5 percent, which suggests that 2000 presidential election participation increased the probability of 2004 election participation by 4.9 to 7.3 percentage points. Second, participation in past presidential elections affects partisan identification. Third, these effects continue to persist for several election cycles after a voter first becomes eligible.
  
  
• The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Approach
  Joint with Alan Gerber and Dan Kessler
  Previous Version NBER Working Paper 14206
  
  During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out 6 pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent’s conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had both a statistically and politically significant effect on the challenger’s vote share. Our estimates suggest that a ten percentage point increase in the amount of mail sent to a precinct increased the challenger’s vote share by approximately three percentage points. Furthermore, our results suggest that the mechanism for this increase was persuasion rather than mobilization.
  
  
• The Effect of Convenience Voting on Election Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
  Joint with Neil Malhotra
  Previous Version Stanford GSB Working Paper 2002
  
  Voting-by-mail (VBM) provides voters the opportunity to cast ballots without being exposed to the information revealed in the final weeks leading up to Election Day. We assess whether the resulting informational differences between VBM and polling place voters affect electoral outcomes. We overcome the identification problem caused by the self-selection of voters into VBM by exploiting a natural experiment in the 2008 California presidential primary in which some precincts are assigned to be VBM-only based on an arbitrary threshold of the number of registered voters. Using a regression discontinuity design we show that VBM both increases the probability of selecting withdrawn candidates and affects the relative performance of candidates remaining in the race. Our findings have implications both for public policy and for the study of campaign events and momentum in American elections.