Welcome to my site!
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Political Science. Last academic year (2024-2025), I was also a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Graduate Fellow at the Center for Study of Law and Society (CSLS).
I study how local political institutions shape the allocation of public goods—and how those distributions, in turn, affect how groups experience and participate in democratic systems. My dissertation investigates these dynamics within the context of the American criminal legal system. Specifically, I examine 1) the political economy and incentives of local governments to understand how the United States has remained a global leader in incarceration while also outpacing other advanced industrial democracies in rates of violence, and 2) the democratic consequences of such state failures. I do so using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, including spatial analysis, interviews, and causal inference designs. This project has been recognized with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award.
More broadly, I’m interested in local politics, comparative political economy, political geography, and public policy. My research has either been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly.
Prior to coming to Berkeley, I received a B.S. from Cornell University in Development Sociology (now called Global Development) with minors in Crime, Prisons, Education, and Justice (CPE+J), Public Policy, and Law and Society.
You can find my CV here.
Published Papers
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Lethal Violence and the Racialized Failure of the American State
2024. Rebekah Jones, Lisa Miller. Perspectives on Politics. PDF Publisher's Version
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A validation and extension of state-level public policy mood: 1956–2020
2023. Julius Lagodny, Rebekah Jones, Julianna Koch, Peter K. Enns. State Politics & Policy Quarterly. PDF Publisher's Version
Working Papers
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Enclaves of Isolation: Violence and Political Participation in U.S. Cities (Conditionally Accepted) at the American Journal of Political Science
Jul 15, 2025. Rebekah Jones. Working paper.
Abstract (click to expand)
Does spatial proximity to violence mobilize or depress individuals for political action? While research across the social sciences has illuminated the various forms of social isolation that characterize high-violence American neighborhoods, the democratic consequences of proximate exposure to violence have not been well understood. Merging voter files in U.S. cities and geocoded crime data, I test whether living in close proximity to sites of homicides affects one’s likelihood of voting in federal elections. Employing a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design, I provide causal evidence that close residential proximity to homicide depresses turnout by roughly four to six percentage points, with the strongest effects observed in plurality-Black block groups and those involving a Black victim. In further mechanism tests, I analyze 1) foot-traffic data aggregated by census block groups to examine how violence exposure affects population movement and 2) crime-linked survey data. Together, the analyses provide significant evidence that the unequal psychological burden of fear, shaped by an individual’s perception of their risk of victimization, may drive social isolation and the observed negative effects. Generally, I consider how persistently high and spatially concentrated rates of violence in the United States shape patterns of political participation in race-class subjugated communities and affect democratic health more broadly.
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(In)Capacity, Violence, and the Local Roots of Mass Incarceration
Jul 10, 2025. Rebekah Jones. Working paper.
Abstract (click to expand)
What explains local variation in incarceration rates? While local governments play a central role in the criminal justice system, most scholarship has focused on state and federal policy, obscuring the role of counties in driving the American prison boom. This paper addresses that gap by applying leading theoretical frameworks to over thirty years of county-level penal policy choices across more than 1,800 jurisdictions. I show that more variation in incarceration rates occurs within states than across them, underscoring the need to examine local–rather than solely state-level determinants of punishment. I revisit dominant accounts of the prison boom by distinguishing between relative changes over time and absolute levels of violent crime and prison admissions. Relative measures confirm prior findings that incarceration failed to decline alongside post-1990s crime drops, suggesting a decoupling between crime and punishment. Yet absolute comparisons reveal a different reality: in most counties, violent crime consistently outpaced prison admissions, with few ever approaching parity between the two. To explain divergent local trajectories, I examine the role of public opinion and novel measures of local capacity. Using dynamic multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) estimates and California ballot initiative turnout data, I find limited evidence that county public opinion drove incarceration growth. Instead, original historical court statisticscapturing caseloads and law enforcement capacity show that local capacity to respond to high levels of violence strongly predicts prison admissions. These findings challenge the dominant over-punitive narrative, reframing mass incarceration as a product of uneven local capacity-building rather than a uniform overreaction to crime decline, with implications for understanding its persistence and resistance to reform.
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Can Local Electoral Reforms Improve Police Responsiveness?
Jun 10, 2025. Rebekah Jones. Working paper.
Abstract (click to expand)
One of the most enduring critiques of American policing is its uneven responsiveness to communities at the racial and economic margins---those often most in need of public safety services yet least empowered to demand and influence them. This study investigates how institutional reforms aimed at reducing participatory inequality affect racial disparities in policing outcomes across California municipalities. I exploit two exogenous shifts linked to increased turnout among racially minoritized groups: (1) the adoption of district-based elections following the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA), and (2) statewide mandates transitioning local elections from off-cycle to on-cycle timing. Using these reforms as quasi-natural experiments, I find that efforts to broaden civic participation are associated with modest improvements in police responsiveness, as measured by overall clearance rates. However, these gains do not consistently extend to more acute indicators of service equity---such as racial inequality in homicide clearance rates and 911 response times. Notably, the shift to district elections appears to exacerbate representational inequality. To explore potential mechanisms, I analyze municipal deliberation patterns using text data from city council meeting minutes. Findings suggest that representational venues themselves may reinforce disparities in public service responsiveness, even in the wake of formal institutional reform.
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Bargain Policing: How Local Fiscal Inequality Sorts Officer Quality in Law Enforcement Labor Markets
Jun 5, 2025. Rebekah Jones. Working paper.
Abstract (click to expand)
A hallmark of American-style federalism is its strong local fiscal autonomy paired with limited redistribution across jurisdictions. Scholars have long observed that reliance on local tax bases can deepen fiscal inequality, weakening the equitable provision of public goods and encouraging affluent residents to exit communities with greater social spending needs. While existing research has focused on how fiscal inequality shapes public goods provision through patterns of residential sorting, I use the case of policing to highlight an underexplored mechanism: uneven capacity to compete for human capital in the public sector. Using detailed officer-level data alongside financial and administrative records from 15 states, I examine how fiscal inequality shapes local governments’ capacity to attract and retain police personnel in the law enforcement labor market. I find that fiscal disparities not only undermine staffing stability but also lead to significant differences in the qualifications of incoming officers, with downstream effects on crime rates, arrest patterns, and officer complaints. Together, the findings offer new insight into the structural roots of uneven policing in the United States and the hidden costs of decentralized governance.
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Examining the Consequences of Fragmented Reform: Local Variation in California’s Public Safety Realignment
May 5, 2025. Amy Lerman and Rebekah Jones. Working paper.
Abstract (click to expand)
American federalism affords lower-level jurisdictions tremendous flexibility in how policies are implemented. In some cases, this can allow for tailoring of policies to be contextually appropriate, innovative, and effective for their specific populations. In others, however, variation in how policies are implemented can result in unevenly distributed social and economic outcomes with significant implications for governance and inequality. Using detailed data from the California Department of Justice, we examine the impacts of a major state policy reform designed to reduce imprisonment, AB109. We find wide variation in the local effects of reform: we estimate that if all arrests had been made in the most lenient county, the result would have been 80% fewer prison sentences. In contrast, if all arrests had been made in the most punitive county, prison sentences would have increased by 150%. We also consider how variation in local implementation affected one of the most democratically destructive features of the American criminal justice system: racial inequality. Once we factor in local decision making, we find that racial disparities in total imprisonment actually increased following reform. These findings help clarify the important role federalism can play in determining the effects of public policy, in ways that can exacerbate racial disparities and potentially erode the legitimacy of law.