Jacob R. Brown

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boston University

I study where people live and how where they live influences their politics.

At BU, I teach courses on American politics and quantitative methodology.

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Working Papers

• Exposure to Homelessness and Support for Policy Remedies. Joint with Adrian Pietrzak and Alexander Sahn.
• How Crisis Reshapes Government Talent. Joint with Maria Silfa and Hunter Rendleman. Revise and Resubmit, American Political Science Review.
• The Effect of Childhood Environment on Political Behavior: Evidence from Young U.S. Movers, 1992-2021. Joint with Enrico Cantoni, Sahil Chinoy, Martin Koenen, and Vincent Pons.
  
• Sources and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. -- Evidence from Migration Patterns of 143 Million Voters. Joint with Enrico Cantoni, Ryan Enos, Vincent Pons, and Emilie Sartre. (Covered by the New York Times).
• Partisan Sorting and Geographic Polarization: How People and Politics Cluster by Place. Joint with Delfina Ferro. Prepared for the Handbook of American Political Geography.
• Bureaucratic Inertia or Legal Responsiveness? College Admissions Officers' Behavior Before and After the Affirmative Action Ban. Joint with Hanno Hilbig and Hunter Rendleman. Revise and Resubmit, Perspectives on Politics.

Academic Publications

• Local Partisan Context and Mental Health. Forthcoming. Joint with Ryan Baxter-King, Ryan Enos, Arash Naeim, and Lynn Vavreck. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Supporting Information].
• City Racial Segregation Statistics are Robust to Aggregation Bias. 2026. Joint with Christopher Kenny and Tyler Simko. Nature Cities. [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
• What is Ideological Capture and How Do We Measure It? Using Antitrust Reform to Understand Expert-Public Cleavages. 2025. Joint with Nicholas Short and Sophie Hill. Perspectives on Politics. [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
• City-Defined Neighborhood Boundaries in the United States. 2025. Joint with Stephen Ansolabehere, Ryan Enos, Ben Shair, Tyler Simko, and David Sutton. Nature Scientific Data. [Data; Cite].
• Priming Bias versus Post-treament Bias in Experimental Designs. Joint with Matthew Blackwell, Sophie Hill, Kosuke Imai, and Teppei Yamamoto. 2025. Political Analysis. [Supporting Information; R package; Replication; Cite].
• Partisan Conversion Through Neighborhood Influence: How Voters Adopt the Partisanship of their Neighbors. 2025. Journal of Politics. (Covered by the New York Times). [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
• Forecasting Turnout. 2024. Joint with Stephen Ansolabehere, Kabir Khanna, Connor Halloran Philips, and Charles Stewart III. Harvard Data Science Review. [Replication; Cite].
• Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods. 2024. Joint with Cory McCartan and Kosuke Imai. American Political Science Review. [Survey tool; R package; Replication; Cite].
  
• The Obama Effect? Race, First-time Voting, and Future Participation. 2023. Political Science Research and Methods. [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• How Local Partisan Context Conditions Pro-social Behaviors: Mask-Wearing During COVID-19. 2022. Joint with Ryan Baxter-King, Ryan Enos, Arash Naeim, and Lynn Vavreck. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• Locked Out of College: When Admissions Bureaucrats Do and Do Not Discriminate. 2022. Joint with Hanno Hilbig. British Journal of Political Science. [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• Resisting Broken Windows: The Effect of Neighborhood Disorder on Political Behavior. 2022. Joint with Michael Zoorob. Political Behavior. [Ungated; Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• Childhood Cross-ethnic Exposure Predicts Political Behavior Seven Decades Later: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data. 2021. Joint with Ryan Enos, James Feigenbaum, and Shom Mazumder. Science Advances. (Covered by the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the Daily Mail). [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• The Measurement of Partisan Sorting for 180 Million Voters. 2021. Joint with Ryan Enos. Nature Human Behaviour. (Covered by the New York Times, and The Atlantic). [Supporting Information; Replication; Cite].
  
• Weakening Strong Black Political Empowerment: Implications from Atlanta’s 2009 Mayoral Election. 2014. Joint with Michael Leo Owens. Journal of Urban Affairs, 36:4, 663-681. [Cite].
  

Other Writing

• Do You Live in a Political Bubble? Joint with Gus Wezerek and Ryan Enos. New York Times.
• A Prescription for Change: Voter Registration in Emergency Rooms. Joint with Alister Martin. Harvard Kennedy School Review.
• Partisan Segregation and Partisan Activation: How Geographic Polarization Increases Political Engagement.
  
• Who are America’s Homeless Voters? How Shelters Make Citizens. Joint with Michael Zoorob.