We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18--40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economically elite families: their fathers earn more, attain more education, and hold more wealth. The brothers of future MCs sit between the population and the MCs themselves. Across the socioeconomic measures we compare, we calculate that roughly half of an MC's adult premium is shared with his brother and the other half is his own. Even as the American economy and political system have changed, the family background gap has widened over the last century and a half. Wealth, household servants, and four separate occupation-based scores all show the gap holding or growing across cohorts. We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design---women's suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators---and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Whether and how individuals link benefits they receive from the government to their voting behavior is a central question in political economy. We study this question using one of the largest social provision programs in the United States: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). We exploit the staggered roll-out of state-level EITC programs to estimate the causal effect of the program on elections, voter behavior, and attitudes about the government. Contrary to predictions from the policy feedback literature, we show that the credit leads to higher vote shares and approval ratings for the implementing governor. These effects are temporally limited to the first years of the credit’s availability, and dissipate over time. Taken together, our results suggest that voters are responsive to the benefit.

A common concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. Studying Washington state's vote-by-mail program, we link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people's mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state (2011-2018), we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for name-matching and the inclusion of deaths closer to Election Day, we conclude that counting dead people's ballots as votes seems extraordinarily rare in Washington's universal vote-by-mail system.

AbstractAn increasing number of states have adopted laws that require voters to show photo identification to vote. We show that the differential effect of the laws on turnout among those who lack ID persists even after the laws are repealed. We leverage administrative data from North Carolina and a photo ID law in effect for a primary, but not the subsequent general, election. Using exact matching and a difference-in-differences design, we show that for the 3 percent of voters who lack ID in North Carolina, the ID law caused a 0.7 percentage point turnout decrease in the 2016 primary election relative to those with ID. After the law was suspended, this effect persisted: those without ID were 2.6 percentage points less likely to turnout in the 2016 general election and 1.7 percentage points less likely to turnout in the 2018 general.

We combine deed-level data on homeownership with administrative data on voter turnout in local and national elections for more than 18 million individuals in Ohio and North Carolina. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that buying a home leads individuals to participate substantially more in local elections, on average. We also collect data on local ballot initiatives, and we find that the homeowner turnout boost is almost twice as large in times and places where zoning issues are on the ballot. In addition, the effect of homeownership increases with the price of the home purchase, suggesting that asset investment may be an important mechanism for the participatory effects. Overall, the results suggest that individual economic circumstances importantly influence political beliefs and behavior and suggest that homeowners have special influence in American politics in part because their ownership motivates them to pay attention and participate.

The 2020 U.S. election saw a record turnout, saw a huge increase in absentee voting, and brought unified national Democratic control—yet these facts alone do not imply that vote-by-mail increased turnout or benefited Democrats. Using new microdata on millions of individual voters and aggregated turnout data across all 50 states, this paper offers a causal analysis of the impact of absentee vote-by-mail during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Focusing on natural experiments in Texas and Indiana, we find that 65-year-olds voted at nearly the same rate as 64-year-olds, despite the fact that only 65-year-olds could vote absentee without an excuse. Being just old enough to vote no-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout. Voter interest appeared to be more important in driving turnout across vote modes, neutralizing the electoral impact of Democrats voting by mail at higher rates during the historic pandemic.

Abstract We use nationwide deed-level records on home foreclosures to examine the effects of economic distress on electoral outcomes and individual voter turnout. County-level difference-in-differences estimates show that counties that suffered larger increases in foreclosures did not punish or reward members of the incumbent president's party more than less affected counties. Linking the Ohio voter file to individual foreclosures, difference-in-differences estimates show that individuals whose homes were foreclosed on were less likely to turn out, rather than being mobilized. However, in 2016 counties more exposed to foreclosures supported Trump at substantially higher rates. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the effect of local economic distress on incumbent performance is generally close to zero and only becomes substantial in unusual circumstances.

How do changes to voting procedures affect participation in elections? Looking within the state of North Carolina, I estimate the causal effect of Election Day polling place changes on voter participation using detailed voter file information on nearly 4 million individual voters linked with a panel of polling place locations. Implementing a series of difference-in-differences designs, I find that changing a voter’s polling place location causes a 1 to 2 percentage point decline in general election turnout likelihood. The majority of the turnout decline can be attributed to the search costs associated with finding one’s new polling place location rather than the distance costs of traveling to the polling place on Election Day. This, along with a series of mechanism tests, suggests that providing information to voters is important to help mitigate the voting costs associated with election changes.

Homeowners and renters have participated in politics at different rates throughout American history, but does becoming a property owner motivate an individual to par- ticipate in local politics? I combine deed-level property records in California and Texas with an original dataset on individual comments in local city council meetings to study the role of property ownership in shaping costly forms of political behavior, and I document large inequalities in who participates at city council meetings. I also link property records to individual-level contribution records and administrative voter files and find that becoming a property owner increases an individual’s political activity. Over and above voting in local elections, property ownership motivates individuals to participate in local city council meetings and donate to candidates. These findings illustrate how the experience of homeownership leads property owners to become much more active in local politics.

For over 20 years, the Industrial Macromolecular Crystallography Association Collaborative Access Team (IMCA-CAT) has focused exclusively on accelerating drug discovery and development by delivering synchrotron-based diffraction data.Rapid turnaround of high quality and low-cost structural data is essential in ensuring success in structure-based drug design and an increasing number of computer-aided drug design projects.Today, IMCA-CAT operates a state-of-the-art MX beamline; operating continuously with fully unattended data collection for overnight means that >90% of samples are turned around within one day.IMCA-CAT can handle crystals in a variety of pins and pucks, the data are automatically processed and then rapidly delivered to researchers in a secure, encrypted, and reliable software framework.In addition to MX data collection, IMCA-CAT serves as the conduit for SAXS data collection and structure-based consultancy services.On the horizon are modes of access to Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute's centers for high-throughput crystallization screening, cryo-EM structure determination, and microcrystal electron diffraction.IMCA-CAT is the one-stop shop for all the services that the next generation pharmaceutical structural biologist will need.Opportunities abound for researchers in all pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations to access IMCA-CAT for structural services.

In response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many schol- ars and policy makers are urging the United States to expand voting-by-mail programs to safeguard the electoral process. What are the effects of vote-by-mail? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive design-based analysis of the effect of universal vote-by-mail-a policy under which every voter is mailed a ballot in advance of the election-on electoral outcomes. We collect data from 1996 to 2018 on all three US states that implemented univer- sal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that 1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party?s share of turnout, 2) uni- versal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party?s vote share, and 3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases over- all average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.

A commonly expressed concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. To evaluate how often this occurs in practice, we study the state of Washington, which sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot. We link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for matching names, we conclude that it seems extraordinarily rare for dead people’s ballots to be counted as votes in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system. ∗For helpful information, the authors particularly thank Stuart Holmes and the Washington Secretary of State’s Office. For advice, the authors thank Charles Stewart. For research assistance, the authors thank Sarah Raza. †Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science ‡Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science §Predoctoral Research Fellow, SIEPR ¶Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, UCLA ‖Professor, Department of Political Science and Graduate School of Business (by courtesy); Senior Fellow, SIEPR

Nav1.4 and Nav1.5 are voltage-gated sodium channels that play an important role in the generation of action potential in excitable tissues.Navs control the passage of sodium ions into cells in response to changes in cellular membrane potential.Myotonia, hyperkalemic periodic paralysis, LongQT syndrome and Brugada syndrome are human genetic diseases caused by dysfunction of Nav proteins that harbor mutations in their C-terminal (CT), cytoplasmic regions.To study the Navs proteins with isoform-specificity, we have selected nanobodies; single, variable heavy-chain only antibody domains (VHH domains, 15kDa) derived from llamas.We generated a nanobody phage library by immunizing a llama with purified CTNav1.4 in complex with Calmodulin (CTNav1.4-CaM).High-affinity nanobody clones to CTNav1.4-CaMcomplex were selected by immune panning from the phage library and used for periplasmic expression in E. coli.Two anti-CTNav1.4-CaMnanobodies; Nb17 and Nb82 were expressed and purified to homogeneity, while Nb82 was further crystallized and structure determined to 2.0 Å resolution.The asymmetric unit includes four copies with almost identical conformations.The nanobodyfold is decorated by two Π-helices present in CDR1 and CDR3, between β3-β4 and β9-β10 loops.CDR3, the major contributor for antigen recognition and specificity, folds as a random coil that wraps around the β-sheets β6-β5-β4-β9 finishing up in a Π-helix of seven residues.Interestingly, Nb82 stabilizes the CTNav1.4-CaMcomplex as observed by a 'right-shift' of 13°C in the melt curve of CTNav1.4-CaM,while forming a stable CTNav1.4-CaM+Nbcomplex on size exclusion chromatography.

We link future members of Congress to the de-anonymized 1940 census to offer a uniquely detailed analysis of how economically unrepresentative American politicians were in the 20th century, and why.Future members under the age of 18 in 1940 grew up in households with parents who earned more than twice as much as the population average and who were more than 6 times as likely as the general population to hold college degrees.However, compared to siblings who did not become politicians, future members of Congress between the ages of 18 and 40 in 1940 were higher-earners and more educated, indicating that socioeconomic background alone does not explain the differences between politicians and non-politicians.Examining a smaller sample of candidates that includes non-winners, we find that the candidate pool is much higher-earning and more educated than the general population.At the same time, among the candidate pool, elections advantage candidates with higher earnings ability and education.We conclude that barriers to entry likely deter a more economically representative candidate pool, but that electoral advantages for more-educated individuals with more private-sector success also play an important role.

The voltage-gated sodium channel Nav1.5 underlies the inward sodium current responsible for cardiomyocyte depolarization during excitation of the heart muscle cell. Channel-interacting proteins regulate the channel properties through interactions with the C-terminal tail of the channel (Nav1.5CT), which projects into the cytoplasm of the cardiomyocyte. The mutation S1904L in Nav1.5CT is found in individuals with cardiac arrhythmias that present with Brugada Syndrome and Long QT Syndrome, which often lead to Sudden Cardiac Death. Our lab used iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) from a patient with this mutation and a mixed Brugada Syndrome phenotype to electrophysiologically characterize the mutation at a single cell level in comparison with CRISPR-corrected isogenic control iPSC-CMs. We also analyzed the protein interactions of WT Nav1.5CT and Nav1.5CT S1904L and found that the mutated channel has a markedly decreased binding affinity with the calcium-dependent channel regulator Calmodulin (CaM). We attempted to restore this binding affinity by designing compensatory mutations to CaM based on our lab's crystal structure of the Nav1.5CT-CaM complex. While we were not able to restore the wild-type binding affinity, we did get improvement in the binding between Nav1.5CT S1904L and our compensatory CaM molecules relative to Nav1.5CT S1904L and WT CaM.

Whether and how individuals link benefits they receive from the government to their voting behavior is a central question in political economy. We study this question using one of the largest social provision programs in the United States: The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). We exploit the staggered roll-out of state-level EITC programs to estimate the causal effect of the program on elections, voter behavior, and attitudes about the government. Contrary to predictions from the policy feedback literature, we show that the credit leads to higher vote shares and approval ratings for the implementing governor. These effects are temporally limited to the first years of the credit's availability, and dissipate over time. Taken together, our results suggest that voters are responsive to the benefit.

One contentious question in contemporary election administration is the impact of voter identification requirements. We study a Virginia law that allows us to isolate the impact of requiring voters to show photo identification. Using novel, precinct-level data, we find that the percentage of registered voters without a driver's license and over age 85 are both positively associated with the number of provisional ballots cast due to a lack of a photo ID. To examine the law's impact on turnout, we associate precinct-level demographics with the change in turnout between the 2013 gubernatorial and 2014 midterm elections. All else equal, turnout was higher in places where more active registered voters lacked a driver's license. This unexpected relationship might be explained by a targeted Department of Elections mailing, suggesting that the initial impact of voter ID laws may hinge on efforts to notify voters likely to be affected.

Roughly 7 million Americans lost homes to foreclosure during the Great Recession. Despite claims that the subprime mortgage crisis helped fuel recent political turmoil in the U.S., we lack systematic empirical evidence about the effects of this unprecedented spike in home foreclosures on American elections. We combine nationwide deed-level public records data on home foreclosures with election data and administrative voter data to examine the effects of home foreclosures on electoral outcomes and on individual voter turnout. At the aggregate level, county-level difference-in-differences estimates show that counties that suffered larger increases in foreclosures did not punish or reward members of the incumbent president's party more than less affected counties. At the individual level, merging the Ohio voter file with foreclosure data, difference-in-differences estimates reveal that Ohioans whose homes were foreclosed on were somewhat less likely to turn out to vote, particularly when foreclosures occurred close to election day. The findings cast doubt on the claim that individual-level economic distress during the Great Recession directly activated angry voters, and raise questions about the posited causal link between economic distress and the electoral punishment of incumbents.

Voltage-gated sodium channels (Na-V) underlie the rapid upstroke of action potentials in excitable tissues. Binding of channel-interactive proteins is essential for controlling fast and long-term inactivation. In the structure of the complex of the carboxy-terminal portion of Na(V)1.5 (CTNa(V)1.5) with calmodulin (CaM)-Mg2+ reported here, both CaM lobes interact with the CTNa(V)1.5. On the basis of the differences between this structure and that of an inactivated complex, we propose that the structure reported here represents a non-inactivated state of the CTNaV, that is, the state that is poised for activation. Electrophysiological characterization of mutants further supports the importance of the interactions identified in the structure. Isothermal titration calorimetry experiments show that CaM binds to CTNa(V)1.5 with high affinity. The results of this study provide unique insights into the physiological activation and the pathophysiology of Na-V channels.