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How do working class candidates perform in primary elections? Working class candidates rarely emerge, but existing evidence suggests workers perform as well as white-collar candidates once on the ballot. However, this evidence comes from studies of general elections. It is unknown whether these findings extend to other types of elections like primaries, where candidates compete without the political and financial backing of a party. We collect and analyze novel data describing the occupational background of all candidates who competed in U.S. House primaries between 2008 and 2016. The results show that working class candidates received an average vote share 24 percentage points lower than nonworkers and are 31 percentage points less likely to win their primaries. Controlling for other candidate, contest, and district characteristics helps to attenuate the performance gap. We find mixed evidence that fundraising and prior officeholding experience moderates workers' performance, but weak or no evidence that voter bias, party affiliation, or primary type do so. The study suggests that workers struggle to compete in primaries and calls for further research explaining what prevents workers from winning public office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do states copy or reinvent language from complex policies as they diffuse, and does this depend on legislative resources? We argue that states will more frequently reinvent more complex policies, but that states with high-resource legislatures will reinvent more than their low-resource counterparts for more complex policies. We test the theory using the bill texts from 18 policies that diffused across the 50 states from 1983 to 2014, measuring reinvention and complexity using text analysis tools. In line with expectations, we find that complex policies are reinvented more than simple policies and that high-resource legislatures reinvent bills more than low-resource legislatures on average. However, we also find that low-resource legislatures reinvent complex policies at about the same rate as high-resource legislatures. The results indicate that even legislatures with limited resources work to adapt complex policies during the diffusion process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wage-productivity tradeoffs involved in locating a plant in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, were examined. A production function approach was used to to estimate spatial variations in productivity. The findings indicated that the agglomeration economies in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area improved plant productivity, but the firms had to deal with high wage payments and high land costs. Firms could obtain labor cost savings by locating plants in the outer regions of the city. A spontaneous decentralization of industry could occur as a result of market forces.

Research on policy reinvention tends to focus on whether policies become more or less comprehensive over time while neglecting to explain copying policy language verbatim. We argue that the extent to which lawmakers reinvent policy depends on the resources available to them. Lawmakers serving in more professional state legislatures have greater capacity to reinvent policies. In contrast, lawmakers serving in less professional settings are more likely to copy policy language. As evidence, we gather bill texts of 12 policies that diffused across the 50 states between 1982 and 2014. Using cosine similarity scores to measure language copying, we find that less professional legislatures copy more text from previous adopters, and that the likeliest culprit is a lack of funding for staff assistance. The findings have implications for states' ability to amend policies to suit their own citizens' needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]