Jake Jares

Jake Jares is a PhD candidate in political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His current research agenda digs deep into the substance of U.S. farm policies to assess the manner in which the political preferences and engagement of mass and elite constituents shape the policymaking process. U.S. farm safety net programs—colloquially known as “farm subsidies”— have long been held up as a paragon of distributive politics. Political scientists and pundits gravitate towards a simple story: incumbent members of Congress work to send money home to appease a constituency whose votes and campaign contributions are critical for their reelection prospects. This narrative made sense in the early years following the passage of the first farm bill in 1933. After all, roughly one in five Americans lived on the farm, and agriculture was one of the largest industries nationwide. Nine decades later, however, U.S. crop production is but a shadow of its former self, accounting for less than 1% of the population, labor force, and national economic output—and yet, the farm safety net holds strong. In ongoing work, Jake uses an array of large-scale data sources to argue that 21st century farmers no longer have enough economic or electoral clout for the classic story to hold water. Fortunately for crop growers, neither ballots nor dollars are the main currency in the modern political economy of farm policy. Farm groups regularly plow through the opposition of conservative billionaires, and small groups often dominate larger ones. Across a variety of quantitative case studies, Jake argues that farmers’ continued influence in Congress cuts through prevailing notions of how ideology, elections, and money shape the U.S. policymaking process.

Jake employs large-scale administrative data, survey experiments, and modern causal inference techniques to shed light on the factors that hold a first-order importance in fueling the complex and opaque American political economy. His current research agenda digs deep into the substance of U.S. farm policies to assess the manner in which the political preferences and engagement of mass and elite constituents shape the policymaking process.

Over the upcoming academic year, Jake will be conducting large-scale data analysis and fielding surveys of farmers, voters, and politicians to shed light on the key determinants of farm policy developments.