Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Going into Government: How Hiring from Special Interests Reduces Their Influence” with Ryan Hubert and Janna King Rezaee. American Journal of Political Science, 2022.
Under Review
Running Towards Rankings: Ranked Choice Voting’s Impact on Candidate Entry and Descriptive Representation
*Invited to Revise and Resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science
- In this study I use difference-in-differences with matching to assess the claim that Ranked Choice Voting induces more candidate to enter elections, as well as knock on benefits such as an increasingly descriptive candidate pool and more high quality candidates.
Working Papers
Ward Against Ward: Particularism in District-Based City Councils
*Presented at APSA 2023
- How does the adoption of district elections affect the legislative attentions of city councilmembers? Using an innovative new method for extracting and categorizing agenda items from city council meeting records and a regression discontinuity design, I find that councilmembers elected from city districts spend less time on particularistic issues compared to those elected at-large.
Local Birds or a National Flock: Measuring Ideology at the Local Level Using Twitter
*Presented at MPSA 2022
- In this study I explore whether Twitter following patterns can accurately estimate the ideological positions of local politicians in San Francisco and New York City.
Ranked Choice Voting and Political Expression: How Voting Aids Influence Informed and Uninformed Citizens’ Decision-making,
co-authoring with Cheryl Boudreau and Scott MacKenzie
*Presented at MPSA 2022
- While RCV systems offer more opportunities for citizens to express their political preferences, they also require more knowledge about the candidates and utilize more complex ballots. Which voters will take advantage of this opportunity and how they will choose to use it are both open questions that will determine the wisdom of the continuing spread of RCV implementation. We take one of the most systematic steps towards answering these questions by implementing survey experiments in three cities that have adopted RCV systems: New York City, San Francisco, and Oakland.
Policy Reports
Colner, Jonathan, The Short-Term Impact of Ranked-Choice Voting on Candidate Entry and Descriptive Representation (February, 2023). Available at New America.
Colner, J. P, & D’Agostino, M. (2022). Lessons from Cities Considering Congestion Pricing. UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies.
Boudreau, Cheryl and Colner, Jonathan and MacKenzie, Scott A., Ranked-Choice Voting and Political Expression: How Voting Aids Narrow the Gap between Informed and Uninformed Citizens (December 2020). Available at New America.