Research
Book Projects (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 political activity and policy influence: the concentration 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.
Ottone, Nicholas and Amanda Weiss. Bad Neighbors: The Politics of Prisons.
- Abstract: From 1980 to 2000, the United States opened more than four hundred new prisons, a rapid expansion of carceral capacity that mirrored a punitive turn in public opinion. Many studies have documented the consequences of mass incarceration for those targeted by the criminal legal system, but few have examined the impact of the construction of prisons and their most recent closures on residents who live near them. Using a novel dataset of all U.S. prison openings and closures since 1979, we explore the causal effects of prison construction and closures on electoral, economic, and demographic outcomes. We find that prisons make bad neighbors — arresting economic growth, constraining industries, encouraging community turnover — and nearby residents hold Republican elected officials responsible across offices. This book challenges conventional depictions of prison towns and contributes to our understanding of how carceral policies shape political behavior.
Working Papers
Harris, Allison, Nicholas Ottone and Hannah Walker. “Diversity among Courthouse Colleagues and Individual Decision Making”. Invited to Revise and Resubmit, working paper available here
- 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”. Under review, 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”. Under review, 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, “Canvassing Mobilizes and Increases Vote Share: Evidence from a Local Election in Seattle”. Under review, working paper available here
- Abstract: A long line of research has shown that door-to-door canvassing is a potent campaign tactic for increasing turnout and, in some cases, vote share. More recent work has theorized, however, that canvassing effects are largest in low-salience elections without party cues and concentrated among occasional voters canvassed closer to Election Day. In this research note, I test these theoretical expectations by examining the effect of canvassing in a February local election in Seattle for a housing-related ballot measure. Using a novel geo-coded dataset of seventy doorknocking campaigns over three months, I find that voters more proximate to canvassing operations were more likely to vote and that proximate precincts had a slightly higher vote share for the targeted ballot measure. Moreover, consistent with recent theorizing, I find that turnout effects were concentrated among targeted Democrats canvassed soon before the election.
Ottone, Nicholas and Amanda Weiss. “The Electoral Effects of U.S. Prison Construction”. Working paper available here
- Abstract: From 1980 to 2000, the United States opened more than 400 new prisons, a rapid expansion of carceral capacity that mirrored a punitive turn in public policy and public opinion. Yet few empirical studies have examined the impact of prison construction on individuals who live near them and their political behavior. We develop a theoretical model that traces how prison openings affect economic, attitudinal, and electoral outcomes in surrounding communities. Using difference-in-difference models and a novel county-level dataset of prison openings in the United States, we find that prison construction decreases county-level vote share for Republican candidates, especially if Republicans represented the county during prison construction. Drawing on additional analyses of economic outcomes and support for prison bond measures in Maine, we argue that voters sanction issue-owning Republican candidates for negative economic externalities and turn against funding future prisons. These findings challenge conventional understandings of how historical prison-building affected communities and have implications for contemporary expansions of carceral capacity.
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.