DAISI Seminar - Elliott Ash

“The Nationalization of American Lawmaking? Evidence from State Statutes”

SPEAKER: Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich)

ABSTRACT:

This paper analyzes the adoption and diffusion of legislation enacted by U.S. States since 1800. We use a large language model to extract and structure the policy content of the universe of statutes enacted by state legislatures (N=2.5 million). We then construct sets of related policies across states using an unsupervised clustering algorithm applied to vector representations of the statutes' policy contents. We compute measures of similarity, diffusion, and innovation across states with legislative activity on these policy clusters. After validating this measurement procedure, we analyze the determinants of diffusion. We find that states with greater geographic, economic, and political similarity implement more similar policies. While polarization has risen significantly since the early 2000s, consistent with prior literature, we show that current levels of polarization are comparable to those observed in the pre-WWII period, following a U-shaped pattern over time. Polarization primarily reflects differences in policy choices within topics rather than in the topics on which states choose to legislate. Finally, we document an increasing nationalization of policy, with federal legislative texts exerting growing influence on state legislation since the post-war period. 

BIO:

Elliott Ash is a Professor of Economics at ETH Zürich, affiliated with the Center for Law, Economics, and Data Science. He is widely recognized for applying machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to address fundamental questions in law, economics, and political economy. His work spans various unstructured data types, including text, images, and audio-visual materials. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of his research, he has published extensively in economics, political science, law, and computer science journals.

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