Rebekah Jones is a political scientist who studies how local political institutions shape the allocation of public goods—and how those distributions, in turn, affect how groups experience and participate in democratic systems.

Jones’ dissertation investigates these dynamics within the context of the American criminal legal system. Specifically, Jones examines 1) the political economy and incentives of local governments to understand how the United States has remained a global leader in incarceration while also outpacing other advanced industrial democracies in rates of violence, and 2) the democratic consequences of such state failures. She does this by using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, including spatial analysis, interviews, and causal inference designs. This project has been recognized with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award.

More broadly, Jones is interested in local politics, comparative political economy, political geography, and public policy. Jones’s research has either been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly.

Jones is a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Political Science and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.