In this edition of Inside RAI, we are sharing a wide variety of research projects affiliated scholars completed in the past year, including studies and reports concerning reforming Congress, fiscal federalism, poll trends around the 2024 US Presidential vote, and new insights into Latinos as a US voting bloc.
In this edition of Inside RAI, we are sharing a wide variety of research projects affiliated scholars completed in the past year, including studies and reports concerning reforming Congress, fiscal federalism, poll trends around the 2024 US Presidential vote, and new insights into Latinos as a US voting bloc. There are also previews into new research projects underway at Hoover and across the wider Stanford community, funded by RAI’s inaugural year of its seed grant research program.
Governmental Institutions
The Budgetary Impact of the Abandonment of Federalism
In his chapter in American Federalism Today, Senior Fellow John F. Cogan writes about how the federal government funds an ever-growing share of the activities of state and local governments, contrary to the concept of there being a sharp divide between the responsibilities of each level of government.
Between 1950 and 2019, federal spending on matters originally considered to be the responsibility of states and localities rose from about 2 percent of US GDP to 14 percent. He also says that Congress has refused to adequately adjust revenue during this time to make up for shouldering so much of the states’ fiscal burden. “Since the 1930s, the federal government has, in effect, chosen to take on additional responsibilities and has been persistently unwilling to finance them with tax revenues. Instead, it has financed them with debt,” he writes. Cogan says this trend has significantly stressed the ability of the federal government to meet its fiscal obligations.
Read more from the chapter and the rest of American Federalism Today here.
Revitalizing the House
Scholars from the Hoover Institution joined forces with former members of Congress, staffers, and other academics to write and present a comprehensive report aimed at improving the law-making process within the US House of Representatives.
Released in September 2024, Revitalizing the House: Bipartisan Recommendations on Rules and Process recommends distinctive procedure and rule changes as well as more general adjustments to working conditions, which its authors believe will empower committees and members in ways that will foster more bipartisanship and create more sound legislation.
This effort was cosponsored by the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution and the Sunwater Institute. The lead authors of the report include Center for Revitalizing American Institutions Director Brandice Canes-Wrone; Sunwater Institute Founder Matthew Chervenak; Daniel Lipinski, a Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and former representative (D-IL) from 2005 to 2022; and Philip Wallach, senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute. The Revitalizing the House effort will continue in 2025-2026.
In a December 2024 entry in the Harvard Law Review, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh argues that unlike the past, today’s gravest threats to expressive freedom often come from concentrated private intermediaries—social‑media platforms, app stores, payment processors, web hosts—rather than state censorship. Because First Amendment doctrine focuses on state action and strongly protects editorial discretion, these actors wield sweeping control over who can speak and be heard. But he says US law has long regulated private power to safeguard speech and access to audiences, suggesting room for democratically adopted, speech‑protective structural rules consistent with the Constitution.
Volokh sketches tools to get around private censorship such as transparency, accountability, and appeal requirements; limits on opaque, arbitrary deplatforming; nondiscrimination or carriage duties for chokepoints; and competition, interoperability, and portability measures that reduce a user’s dependence on any single gatekeeper. At the same time, he warns against expanding government control over online discourse, highlighting the dangers of informal coercion. It urges a governance approach that disperses power, protects pluralism, and builds speech infrastructure without dictating content.
Who Are the Election Skeptics? Evidence from the 2022 Midterm Elections
For the Election Law Journal, Senior Fellow Justin Grimmer, Visiting Fellow Sean Westwood, and two coauthors examine the sentiments of 2022 midterm election voters and whether they trust the accuracy of the US election system. Using YouGov polling data, based on interviews with about 9,000 voters before and after the 2022 midterms, they found that 29 percent of respondents believed fraud occurred in the 2022 midterms, and among Republicans that number was nearly 55 percent. They then zero in on the skeptics and find that “the self-reported underpinnings of skepticism are more mundane than conspiratorial.”
How YouGov’s MRP Model Works for the 2024 US Presidential and Congressional Elections
In this piece, Senior Fellow Douglas Rivers, who is also chief data scientist at pollster YouGov, and Delia Bailey, senior vice president of data science at YouGov, inform readers about their polling system and methodology heading into the 2024 US Presidential and Congressional vote. Partnering with Stanford, Arizona State, and Yale Universities to conduct repeated interviews over 11 months leading up to the vote, with a panel of tens of thousands of registered voters, Bailey and Rivers say that data was run through a multi-level regression with post-stratification model. The piece explores how pollsters establish as representative a voter sample as possible and also contends with the limits of public opinion polling when dealing with undecided voters. Hoover supported this polling effort and RAI hosted a conference in January 2025 to discuss the project’s results.
Writing in Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society in October 2024, Senior Fellow Josiah Ober and coauthor Brook Manville discuss how democracy relies on its citizens’ ability to “bargain in good faith with those whose interests are not their own.” Agreements between citizens whose interests don’t align might not always guarantee a perfect outcome, but Ober and Manville write that participants know “they are better off inside the bargain than outside of it and will bargain again another day.” They argue the quality and ease at which citizens and groups bargain with one another depends on their civic skills, political knowledge, and capacity for judgment.
Regarding the wave of protests that took place on US university campuses after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Senior Fellow Rusell A. Berman is conducting research that aims to “analyze these protests at a limited number of institutions in order to determine the demographics and motivations of the participants as well as the character of the responses by faculty and administration.”
In Hawaii, the state government recently approved a major cut to personal income taxes, the largest in the state’s history. Together with Anthony Welch of the University of Chicago, Research Fellow Rebecca Lester is conducting research how taxpayers responded to and perceive the tax cut package, to learn how state governments can best communicate with residents about major policy changes.
Moving to the well-being of America’s veterans, Hoover Veteran Fellow and College of William and Mary Business Professor Jonathan Due is exploring the factors contributing to underemployment of veterans in several US states, including California, Texas, Washington, and Virginia. He is collaborating with Karen Locke of the College of William and Mary, Daniel Perkins at Pennsylvania State University, and Nathan Ainspan, research psychologist at the US Department of Defense.
For more insight from the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions visit
