About

Derek Epp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government within the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on macro politics, agenda setting, criminal justice, and economic inequality. Epp's work involves examining the political processes and factors that influence policy development and implementation, particularly in areas related to criminal justice and economic disparities. As a faculty member, he contributes to the academic community through teaching and research in these key areas of political science.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Law
• Geography
• Public administration
• Economics
• Environmental health
• Demographic economics
• Social psychology
• Business
• Finance
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Measuring disparities to emergency medicine with 200 million voter records: The case of rural hospital closures

  The Journal of Rural Health · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  PURPOSE: Distance to health service providers is related to increased mortality risk and decreased service utilization. However, existing studies of distance to services often rely either on aggregated measures of distance or small samples of survey respondents. Nationwide individual data from 200 million Americans are used to assess various demographic groups' distances to open acute hospitals. METHODS: We gathered the exact location of every open acute hospital from the UNC Cecil G. Sheps Center and the Department of Health and Human Services. We merged this information with data on 200 million voters from the L2 voter file for 2020. We calculate each registered voters' distance to the nearest open hospital in kilometers by demographic, region, and state Medicaid expansion status. RESULTS: The average American adult is 5 miles from the nearest hospital. Native Americans and rural White Americans face the longest distances to medical services. Lower-income adults face longer distances than higher-income adults. Those over 65 are roughly 10% farther away in comparison to those 18-40. Registered Republicans are 30% farther than registered Democrats. Recent hospital closures in states that have yet to expand Medicaid have contributed to all of these disparities. CONCLUSIONS: Lower-income and older Americans, groups that tend to have worse health overall, face the longest travel distances to hospitals-perhaps contributing to income and age-based health disparities. Native Americans and rural whites, who themselves experience considerable health hardship, also have significant travel burdens to receive hospital care. Registered Republicans have longer travels to emergency care than Democrats, adding to recent research on partisan health disparities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The George Floyd Effect: How Protests and Public Scrutiny Changed Police Behavior

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-03-26 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in many cities throughout the United States. Protesters’ demands ranged from constraints on police use of force to defunding and disbanding the police altogether. These have led some to worry about the possibility of a “Ferguson Effect,” where police withdraw from policing, and in particular discretionary stops and searches, with deleterious consequences for crime. Drawing on data from four cities, we evaluate whether the 2020 BLM protests impacted police behavior, and whether changes in policing negatively impacted public safety. Regression discontinuity-in-time estimates suggest that although depolicing followed the BLM protests, in some respects the quality of policing improved, and public safety was not clearly impacted. Our findings have important implications for research on policing, social movements, and structural inequality in cities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Targeting young men of color for search and arrest during traffic stops: evidence from North Carolina, 2002–2013

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  North Carolina mandated the first collection of demographic data on all traffic stops during a surge of attention to the phenomenon of “driving while black” in the late 1990s. Based on analysis of over 18 million traffic stops, we show dramatic disparities in the rates at which black drivers, particularly young males, are searched and arrested as compared to similarly situated whites, women, or older drivers. Further, the degree of racial disparity is growing over time. Finally, the rate at which searches lead to the discovery of contraband is consistently lower for blacks than for whites, providing strong evidence that the empirical disparities we uncover are in fact evidence of racial bias. The findings are robust to a variety of statistical specifications and consistent with findings in other jurisdictions.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing Socio-Geographic Boundaries and Inequality

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access

  How do patterns of racial inequality shape policing behavior in the United States? We investigate whether police engage in boundary maintenance at geographic points of racial difference. Critical race scholars suggest that police explicitly serve this function. Yet empirical studies are rare and limited to snapshots of a single city, making it hard to distinguish practices employed across departments from agency- and officer-level idiosyncrasies. We leverage high resolution data on police activity in seven U.S. cities to evaluate how police engage with racial boundaries. We find evidence that police activity is elevated in racial boundary zones relative to non-boundary zones, exceeds observed crime, and that racialized outcomes are as much a product of policing practices as they are of conflict between private citizens. We reorient the study of boundaries around top-down processes that lead to their regulation and identify an agenda for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The political economy of fiscal responsibility

  Public Choice · 2025-10-17

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Is the populist Robin Hood a fairy tale? Parliamentary attention to social welfare

  Journal of European Public Policy · 2025-04-15 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the aftermath of the Great Recession, populist parties rose to prominence across Europe, campaigning on the promise to do something about growing economic inequality by funding social welfare programs. We investigate if the pro-welfare reputation of European populist parties, either on the left or the right, is well deserved. We draw on a dataset of questions asked by members of parliament from nine European democracies over three decades. We want to know if members of populist parties spend more of their question time asking about social welfare than members of mainstream parties. Empirical analyses reveal no meaningful difference: populist parties ask about welfare but do not devote a larger share of their questions to the topic than non-populist parties, and rising economic inequality does nothing to change this dynamic. If anything, populist parties ask about welfare less. Our results suggest that populists talk the talk but – once elected – do not walk the walk.

  PublisherDOI

• Better for everyone: Black descriptive representation and police traffic stops

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-23

  articleOpen access

  Racial disparities in citizen interactions with police are ubiquitous concerns in American communities. What difference does electoral representation make? We demonstrate that black descriptive representation in local government affects police activity and scrutiny in a given community. We use a new dataset comprised of over 79 municipal police departments spanning 6 states, based on tens of millions of individual-level traffic stops. In cities and towns with majority-black city councils, traffic stops are less likely to result in a search. This decline in search rates affects both white and black drivers, though the decline is larger for black drivers. Even after controlling for socioeconomic factors, segregation, and crime rates, descriptive representation still matters. A city council composed of a majority of black members is associated with important differences in policing, affecting both white and black residents.

  PublisherDOI

• At the intersection: Race, gender, and discretion in police traffic stop outcomes

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Racial disparities in traffic stop outcomes are widespread and well documented. Less well understood is how racial disparities may be amplified or muted in different contexts. Here we focus on one such situational factor: whether the initial traffic stop was related to a traffic safety violation or a (broadly defined) investigatory purpose. This is a salient contextual characteristic as stop type relates to different levels of assumed discretion and purpose. While all traffic stops involve some officer discretion, investigatory stops are more easily used as justifications to conduct a search based on an officer's diffuse suspicion; traffic safety stops are more often just what they seem. Using millions of traffic stops from several states, we show that black male drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to be found with contraband and that this relationship is amplified where the initial stop purpose is investigatory. One implication of this is that one path to alleviating disparities in traffic stops for agencies is emphasizing traffic safety, rather than using stops as a supplemental investigatory tool.

  PublisherDOI

• Access to Healthcare and Voting: The Case of Hospital Closures in Rural America

  American Political Science Review · 2024-10-25 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  We investigate how hardships affect rural politics, considering the case of hospital closures. In the last two decades, more than two hundred rural hospitals have closed their doors or drastically reduced their services. Drawing from resource models of voting, our hypothesis is that personal- and community-level deprivations brought about by hospital closures should reduce election turnout. Empirical tests pair geographic information on the location of open and closed hospitals with data from state voter files to create a panel of over 10 million rural residents for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 national elections. Results show that individuals whose nearest hospital closed prior to the proximate election were less likely to vote than their unaffected counterparts. These effects are strongest for older and lower-income residents, but they decay over time so that voting likelihood resembles a pre-closure baseline within 12 months.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issue Information

  Journal of Empirical Legal Studies · 2024-02-15

  paratextOpen access

  2007 documents until such time as a stable production version is released.Please use Word's "Save As" option therefore to save your document as an older (DOC) fi le type.Also, please note that there are three preferred formats for digital artwork submission: Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), Portable Document Format (PDF), and Tagged Image Format (TIFF).We suggest that line art be saved as EPS fi les.Alternately, these may be saved as PDF fi les at 600 dots per inch (dpi) or better at fi nal size.Tone art, or photographic images, should be saved as TIFF fi les with a resolution of 300 dpi at fi nal size.For combination fi gures, or artwork that contains both photographs and labeling, we recommend saving fi gures as EPS fi les, or as PDF fi les with a resolution of 600 dpi or better at fi nal size.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Frank R. Baumgartner

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  31 shared

• Kelsey Shoub

  22 shared

• Leah Christiani

  Hunter College

  7 shared

• Kevin Roach

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  6 shared

• Bayard Love

  5 shared

• Bryan D. Jones

  4 shared

• Ben Noble

  University College London

  3 shared

• Enrico Borghetto

  3 shared

Labs

• The Texas Politics ProjectPI

  The Texas Politics Project conducts regular, non-partisan, statewide polls of registered voters in Texas, and makes the results and data available for public use.