From Politics to Process: Evidence from Progressive Era Naturalizations

Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu

No 35903, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: States that delegate governance to local officials face a trade-off between the benefits of local knowledge and the costs of biased administrators. Can imposing federal standards discipline bias and improve uniformity? We study this question by examining the introduction of federal standards to apply for citizenship under the 1906 Naturalization Act. Using newly-digitized census records covering over five million immigrants and a 30-year period, we show that standardizing adjudication of citizenship applications resulted in rapid convergence of naturalization practices across cities. While naturalizations were around 30% higher in election years pre-reform, this electoral cycle disappeared after the introduction of federal standards. Exploiting the staggered adoption of municipal civil service reforms aimed at removing patronage during the Progressive Era, we find that the reduction in political cycles was strongest in unreformed cities. Finally, the contraction in election year naturalizations changed the composition of new citizens. Affected cohorts earned 7% more, were more likely to enter citizenship-restricted occupations, and gave children more Americanized names. Our results thus show that standardizing administrative procedures can discipline politically-biased policy implementation.

JEL-codes: H1 H7 J15 N41 N42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-mig and nep-pol
Note: DAE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35903.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35903

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35903
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().