Department of Economics Guest Speaker - The Winner Effect
Presented by Dr. Patrick Testa
Tulane University
May 1st, 2026, | 10:00am-11:30am | HLH 219
Elections produce winners and losers, and political actors often treat these outcomes as categorical facts—celebrating victories and mourning defeats regardless of margin. But does finishing first rather than second actually change what follows, independent of how close the race was? This paper argues that it does: electoral wins attract the political investment that produces the downstream gains that justify the signal. I test this using the changing political geography of the United States between 1940 and 1968, when urban and minority areas became increasingly central to the Democratic Party. A regression discontinuity design based on close presidential elections—contests with no direct effect on local offices or policies—shows that counties narrowly won by Democrats saw substantial subsequent gains in Democratic local officeholding and voter support. These shifts stem not from underlying political change but from responses to the binary signal of victory, including increased party advertising, voter outreach, civil rights mobilization, and selective Black in-migration. Effects are concentrated in urban, Black, and union areas, where dense organizational networks amplified the signal and coordinated political investment around it.
Biography
Patrick Testa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the Center for Public Policy Research in the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, as well as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He studies how factors such as demography, identity, and beliefs shape economic and political outcomes, in both theoretical and historical context.