Research
Book Project (in-progress)
Ottone, Nicholas. The Policy Influence of Non-Profit Service Providers in Local Politics.
- Abstract: Non-profit service providers are central to the contemporary American welfare state. Since the push for privatization in the late twentieth century, local and state governments have contracted with and outsourced delivery of critical services to community-based non-profit organizations. In turn, non-profit service providers have become outsourced “street-level bureaucrats.” However, unlike bureaucracies, non-profits are private organizations, many of whom are politically active and seek to influence public policy. Work across the social sciences shows us that non-profit service providers can be politically active and influential, but it remains unclear where and how they are. In this book project, I argue that three key factors explain patterns of poltiical activity and policy influence: the concentation of specialized expertise, non-profit embeddedness in governmental policy networks, and interorganizational non-profit coordination. Further, I argue that the market-based structure of America’s delegated welfare state and the encouragement of public-private partnerships foster the kinds of political economies in which non-profit service providers can capture state processes and, contrary to the aims of privatization, ultimately decrease government efficiency.
Working Papers
Harris, Allison, Nicholas Ottone and Hannah Walker. “Diversity among Courthouse Colleagues and Individual Decision Making”. Draft available upon request
- Abstract: Scholarship analyzing data from court filings has found that judges render more racially equitable sentencing decisions as their group of colleagues becomes more racially diverse. With an original interactive survey experiment (N = 1,842), we explore the psychological mechanisms underlying this relationship by randomly assigning respondents to live online chats in which we manipulate the perceived racial composition of chat groups and the discussion topic. Respondents then make sentencing decisions for five Black and five White defendant profiles. We find that assignment to the diverse chat room focused on criminal justice decreased respondents’ selection of an incarceration sentence for Black defendants by 3.3 percentage points (p = 0.045) compared to the homogenous chat room focused on criminal justice. Analysis of the 28,000 messages generated in our experimental chat rooms, further supports the finding that sentencing-relevant conversations led to respondents’ decreased punitiveness toward Black defendants. These results suggest that relevant conversation with racial out-group members drives dominant racial group members’ behavior changes as their colleague group becomes more racially diverse.
Huber, Gregory, Nicholas Ottone and Erik Snowberg. “The Coherence of Citizen Preferences”. Draft available upon request
- Abstract: We use novel survey question design to ascertain the coherence of citizen preferences—both at a point in time and across time—in seven policy domains. Contrary to characterizations of the mass public as lacking meaningful policy preferences, we find that approximately 80\% of people express coherent preferences about 80% of the time. While some key factors thought to predict having “meaningful” preferences are associated with coherence, others—such as political interest, ideological constraint across issues, and extreme most-preferred policies—are only weakly related.
Ottone, Nicholas, “Do Americans Prefer Outsourcing Local Services to Non-Profits and Businesses? Evidence from Experimental Survey Data”. Draft available upon request
- Abstract: For reasons ranging from efficiency to state capacity, government officials are increasingly outsourcing essential services to private businesses and non-profit organizations. Critics charge that outsourcing places the governance of publicly-funded services out of the control of elected officials, degrading democratic accountability. Through three nationally representative experimental studies (total N = 6,643), I find that Americans do not prefer outsourcing to government-run social services. Using hypothetical ballot measures and willingness-to-pay measurements, I find that Americans perceive non-profit organizations as more efficient and aligned with community values than local government but do not support nonprofit-run services any more than government-run services. However, Democrats oppose outsourcing to businesses because they perceive them as discriminatory and less aligned with community values, while Republicans are indifferent between government and business. These findings suggest that constituent demand is an unlikely explanation for widespread outsourcing and have implications for our understanding of political elites’ incentives to outsource.
Ottone, Nicholas, Janae Jackson and Amanda Weiss. “The Electoral Effects of American Prison Construction”. Draft available upon request
- Abstract: Existing research demonstrates that contact with the carceral state produces policy feedback effects among those directly and proximately affected. Few empirical studies, however, explore impacts on individuals living near correctional facilities who may stand to benefit economically from their presence. To address this gap, we analyze data on all prison openings and closures in the United States from 1979 to 2019, examining political and economic effects on surrounding communities at the county level. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, we find that prison construction decreases Republican vote share in Senate and competitive House races. The present study contributes to the growing literature on the feedback effects of the criminal legal system and, more generally, highlights the significance of prisons in American politics.
Publications
Ottone, Nicholas and Limor Peer. 2025. “Code Review, Reproducibility, and Improving the Scholarly Record.”. Harvard Data Science Review 7(3).
- Accompanying Working Paper: Ottone, Nicholas and Limor Peer. 2024. “Unintended Code Errors and Computational Reproducibility”. MetaArXiv.
- Replication Data
Hernandez, Natalie, Nicholas Ottone and Joshua Kalla. 2025. “Targeted Abortion Frames Do Not Mobilize Political Action-Taking”. American Politics Research 53(4), 353-368.
Broockman, David, Joshua Kalla, Nicholas Ottone, Erik Santoro and Amanda Weiss. 2024. “Shared Demographic Characteristics Do Not Reliably Facilitate Persuasion in Interpersonal Conversations: Evidence from Eight Experiments”. British Journal of Political Science 54(4): 1477-85.