About

Clayton Nall is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and an affiliate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on explaining how policies that change geographic space influence American politics. His broader research interests include American political development, public policy, political geography, and political methodology. Nall's book, The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2018), utilizes a range of new data sources constructed from public archives and databases to analyze how the largest public works project in U.S. history contributed to the creation of Republican suburbs, increased the urban-suburban political divide, and exacerbated spatial inequality in metropolitan areas across the nation. Currently, he is pursuing research that broadly addresses the politics of housing and the persistence of incorrect economic beliefs about the functioning of housing markets.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Social psychology
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Psychology
• Economics
• Criminology
• Geology
• Public relations
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• What’s Missing From Supply-Side Progressivism?

  Journal of the American Planning Association · 2025-11-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• JUE Insight: Do housing supply skeptics learn? Evidence from economics and advocacy treatments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• What State Housing Policies Do Voters Want? Evidence from a Platform-Choice Experiment

  Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy · 2024-09-02 · 4 citations

  article

  How much has rising political attention to problems of housing affordability translated into support for market-rate housing development? A tacit assumption of YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) activists is that more public attention to housing affordability will engender more support for their policy agenda of removing regulatory barriers to dense market-rate housing. Yet recent research finds that the mass public has little conviction that more housing supply would improve affordability, which in turn raises questions about the depth of public support for supply-side policies relative to price controls, demand subsidies, or restrictions on “Wall Street” investors, to name a few. In a national survey of 5,000 urban and suburban voters, we elicited perceptions of the efficacy of a wide range of potential state policies for “helping people get housing they can afford.” We also asked respondents whether they support various housing and non-housing policies. Finally, as a way of estimating the revealed importance of housing-policy preferences relative to the more conventional grist of state politics, we elicited preferences over randomized, three-policy platforms. In a set of results that recall the politics of the inflation-ridden 1970s, we find that homeowners and renters alike support price controls, demand subsidies, restrictions on Wall Street buyers, and subsidized affordable housing. The revealed-preference results further suggest, contrary to our expectations, that price controls and anti “Wall Street” restrictions are very important to voters. Contrary to the recommendations of housing economists and other experts, allowing more market-rate housing is regarded as ineffective and draws only middling levels of public support. Opponents of market-rate housing development also care more about the issue than do supporters. Finally, we show that people who claim that housing is very important to them do not have distinctive housing-policy preferences.

  PublisherDOI

• What State Housing Policies Do Voters Want? Evidence from a Platform-Choice Experiment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Do Housing Supply Skeptics Learn? Evidence from Economics and Advocacy Treatments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Can Economic Fact-Checking Remedy Incorrect Beliefs About Housing Markets?

  Housing Policy Debate · 2024-11-13 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Supply skepticism is the widely held belief that building more market-rate housing does not help reduce housing prices. Why is supply skepticism a problem, and what is likely to be publicly engaged scholars’ best approach to correcting it? Been et al. have been the leading scholars bringing attention to the phenomenon, and have compiled new economic evidence that increasingly demonstrates that market-rate housing construction reduces housing prices. Will the skeptics who deny the operation of supply and demand in housing markets be persuaded? This seems unlikely. Engaged policy elites who question the benefit of additional housing supply already have well-formed views that are unlikely to be converted by recent, incremental discoveries about housing supply’s price effects. At first glance, the lay public also appears to be supply-skeptical, but their beliefs are only weakly held and unstable. Instead of clear beliefs about markets (skeptical or otherwise), people hold “folk-economic” views that personalize market interactions and blame “bad actors” for high housing prices. They support state housing policies that would punish putative bad actors (e.g., developers, landlords, and Wall Street investors) while showing only tepid and unstable support for building additional market-rate housing. The silver lining for pro-supply advocates is that the average voter’s poorly formed views about housing markets might be susceptible to education and persuasion campaigns that can effectively simplify current research findings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Current research overstates American support for political violence

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 205 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Criminology
  • Political Science

  SignificanceRecent political events show that members of extreme political groups support partisan violence, and survey evidence supposedly shows widespread public support. We show, however, that, after accounting for survey-based measurement error, support for partisan violence is far more limited. Prior estimates overstate support for political violence because of random responding by disengaged respondents and because of a reliance on hypothetical questions about violence in general instead of questions on specific acts of political violence. These same issues also cause the magnitude of the relationship between previously identified correlates and partisan violence to be overstated. As policy makers consider interventions designed to dampen support for violence, our results provide critical information about the magnitude of the problem.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Folk Economics and the Persistence of Political Opposition to New Housing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political economy
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-02-14

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This is replication data for "Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence"

  PublisherDOI

• Reply to Kalmoe and Mason: The pitfalls of using surveys to measure low-prevalence attitudes and behavior

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-07-25 · 16 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior author

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gary King

  Harvard University Press

  72 shared

• Kosuke Imai

  Harvard University

  60 shared

• Nirmala Ravishankar

  22 shared

• Jason Lakin

  Quantitative BioSciences

  22 shared

• Emmanuela Gakidou

  22 shared

• Héctor Hernández Llamas

  20 shared

• Martha María Téllez‐Rojo

  Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública

  20 shared

• Juan Eugenio Hernández-Ávila

  Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública

  20 shared