Janet Malzahn

Political Economics Ph.D. Student at Stanford GSB

My research explores the political economy of climate change and elections using causal inference techniques. I am a second year Ph.D. student at the Stanford GSB in the political economy group. Previously, I was a predoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, working with Professor Andy Hall.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

  • Election-Denying Republican Candidates Underperformed in the 2022 Midterms (Joint with Andrew B. Hall). Forthcoming @ APSR
    • Abstract We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates for senator, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general over- or under-performed other Republicans in 2022. We find that the average vote share of election-denying Republicans in statewide races was approximately 2.3 percentage points lower than their co-partisans after accounting for state-level partisanship. Election-denying candidates received roughly 2 percentage-points more vote share than other Republican candidates in primaries, on average, although this estimate is quite uncertain. The general-election penalty is larger than the margin of victory in battleground states in recent close presidential elections, suggesting that nominating election-denying candidates in 2024 could be a damaging electoral strategy for Republicans. At the same time, it is small enough to suggest that only a relatively small group of voters changed their vote in response to having an election-denying candidate on the ballot.

Working Papers

Works in Progress

  • Seeking Higher Ground: Partisan Sorting Along Future Inundation Risk from Sea Level Rise.

  • Have Changes to Media and Technology Helped to Nationalize American Elections? (Joint with Daniel M. Thompson, Fang Guo, Alexander Fouirnaies, and Andrew B. Hall)

  • Cable News and Polarization. (Joint with Daniel M. Thompson and Andrew B. Hall)