Publications
Articles and papers are grouped by subject matter. Expand for link to paper, abstract, and replication material.
The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics
Intergroup Relations, Geography, and Psychology
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Does local partisan context influence the adoption of prosocial behavior? Using a nationwide survey of 60,000 adults and geographic data on over 180 million registered voters, we investigate whether neighborhood partisan composition affects a publicly observable and politicized behavior: wearing a mask. We find that Republicans are less likely to wear masks in public as the share of Republicans in their zip codes increases. Democratic mask wearing, however, is unaffected by local partisan context. Consequently, the partisan gap in mask wearing is largest in Republican neighborhoods, and less apparent in Democratic areas. These effects are distinct from other contextual effects such as variations in neighborhood race, income, or education. In contrast, partisan context has significantly reduced influence on unobservable public health recommendations like COVID-19 vaccination and no influence on nonpoliticized behaviors like flu vaccination, suggesting that differences in mask wearing reflect the publicly observable and politicized nature of the behavior instead of underlying differences in dispositions toward medical care.
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Does contact across social groups influence sociopolitical behavior? This question is among the most studied in the social sciences with deep implications for the harmony of diverse societies. Yet, despite a voluminous body of scholarship, evidence around this question is limited to cross-sectional surveys that only measure short-term consequences of contact or to panel surveys with small samples covering short time periods. Using advances in machine learning that enable large-scale linkages across datasets, we examine the long-term determinants of sociopolitical behavior through an unprecedented individual-level analysis linking contemporary political records to the 1940 U.S. Census. These linked data allow us to measure the exact residential context of nearly every person in the United States in 1940 and, for men, connect this with the political behavior of those still alive over 70 years later. We find that, among white Americans, early-life exposure to black neighbors predicts Democratic partisanship over 70 years later.
Supporting Information | Replication Material
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Segregation across social groups is an enduring feature of nearly all human societies and is associated with numerous social maladies. In many countries, reports of growing geographic political polarization raise concerns about the stability of democratic governance. Here, using advances in spatial data computation, we measure individual partisan segregation by calculating the local residential segregation of every registered voter in the United States, creating a spatially weighted measure for more than 180 million individuals. With these data, we present evidence of extensive partisan segregation in the country. A large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment. Such high levels of partisan isolation can be found across a range of places and densities and are distinct from racial and ethnic segregation. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans living in the same city, or even the same neighbourhood, are segregated by party.
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Violent protests are dramatic political events often credited with causing durable and significant changes in public policy. Scholarly research usually treats violent protests as deliberate acts, undertaken in pursuit of specific policy goals. However, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is little evidence of whether riots accomplish these goals. We collect unique electoral measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles Riot---one of the most high-profile events of political violence in recent American history---which occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.
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It is well-established that in diverse societies, certain groups prefer to exclude other groups from power and often from society entirely. Yet as many Western societies are diversifying at an increasingly rapid pace, the need for cross-group cooperation to solve collective action problems has intensified. Do preferences for exclusion inhibit the ability for individuals to cooperate and, therefore, diminish the ability for societies to collectively provide public goods? Some scholarship suggests this may not be the case, since preferences are often not diagnostic of behavior. Turning to Israel, a society with multiple overlapping and politically salient cleavages, we use a large-scale lab-in-the-field design to investigate how much preferences for exclusion among the Jewish majority predict discriminatory behavior toward the Arab minority. We establish that such preferences appear to be symbolic attitudes, are held especially strongly by low-status members of the majority group, and are strongly predictive of costly non-cooperation. This preferences-behaviors relationship appears unaffected by mitigating factors proposed in the intergroup relations literature such as outgroup stereotypes and repeated interactions. The influence of symbolic attitudes on directly observed behavior, which has not been empirically demonstrated before, calls for a closer examination of the social roots of exclusionary preferences.
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Inter-ethnic residential segregation is correlated with intergroup bias and conflict, poorly functioning states and civil societies, weak economic development, and ethno-centric political behavior. Because of these correlations, segregation has been a subject of long-standing interest. However, segregation has not been assigned in randomized controlled trials, so the observed correlations between segregation and these outcomes may be spurious and the mechanism behind these correlations is poorly understood. In two experiments we randomly assign segregation in a laboratory and demonstrate that segregation affects perceptions of other people and causes intergroup bias in costly decision-making. These experiments include the randomized assignment of in-person subjects to the experience of a spatially segregated environment. Rather than segregation merely inhibiting intergroup contact, we demonstrate that segregation directly affects perception and thus can affect intergroup relations even when holding contact constant.
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Comment on Xiao, Coppin, and Van Bavel (2016).
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Why are the negative effects of social diversity more pronounced in some places than in others? What are the mechanisms underlying the relationship between diversity and discriminatory behaviors and why do they vary in prevalence and strength across locations? Experimental research has made advances in examining these questions by testing for differences in behavior when interacting with individuals from different groups. At the same time, research in American and comparative politics has demonstrated that attitudes toward other groups are a function of context. Uniting these two lines of research, we show that discriminatory behaviors are strongly conditioned by the ways in which groups are organized in space. We examine this claim in the context of intra-Jewish conflict in Israel, using original data compiled through multi-site lab-in-the-field experiments and survey responses collected across 20 locations.
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How does the context in which a person lives affect his or her political behavior? I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed, leading to a significant change in voters' behavior, and demonstrating that voters react strongly to changes in an outgroup population. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the removal of their African American neighbors, the white voters' turnout dropped by over ten percentage points. Consistent with psychological theories of racial threat, their change in behavior was a function of the size and proximity of the outgroup population. Proximity was also related to increased voting for conservative candidates. These findings strongly suggest that racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.
Supporting Information | Replication Material | Official Results Memo
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The effect of intergroup contact has long been a question central to social scientists. As political and technological changes bring increased international migration, understanding intergroup contact is increasingly important to scientific and policy debates. Unfortunately, limitations in causal inference using observational data and the practical inability to experimentally manipulate demographic diversity has limited scholars’ ability to address the effects of intergroup contact. Here, I report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing the causal effects of repeated intergroup contact, in which Spanish-speaking confederates were randomly assigned to be inserted, for a period of days, into the daily routines of unknowing Anglo-whites living in homogeneous communities in the United States, thus simulating the conditions of demographic change. The result of this experiment is a significant shift toward exclusionary attitudes among treated subjects. This experiment demonstrates that even very minor demographic change causes strong exclusionary reactions. Developed nations and politically liberal subnational units are expected to experience a politically conservative shift as international migration brings increased intergroup contact.
Campaigns and Voting Behavior
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Socio-economic disadvantage is a major correlate of low political participation. This association is among the most robust findings in political science. However, it is based largely on observational data. The causal effects of early-life disadvantage in particular are even less understood, because long-term data on the political consequences of randomized early-life anti-poverty interventions is nearly nonexistent. We leverage the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment to test the long-term effect of moving out of disadvantaged neighborhoods – and thus out of deep poverty – on turnout. MTO is one of the most ambitious anti-poverty experiments ever implemented in the US. Although MTO ameliorated children’s poverty long-term, we find that, contrary to expectations, the intervention did not increase children’s likelihood of voting later in life. Additional tests show the program did not ameliorate their poverty enough to affect turnout. These findings speak to the complex relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and low political participation.
Supporting Information -
A growing literature argues that national issues and partisanship structure local-level conflict in the United States. This argument contrasts starkly with the traditional view of local politics as fundamentally nonpartisan and nonideological. We reconsider these diverging arguments. We use a large-scale survey of municipal officials to examine elite preferences on a series of policy tradeoffs. We identify latent dimensions that underlie elite preferences across cities and on a common scale. We examine correlates of these dimensions including individual- and city-level demographics and electoral support from constituent groups. Our results demonstrate that elite preferences in local politics—unlike in national politics—are multidimensional, with two underlying cleavages: one based on partisanship, the other a market orientation to the provision of local services. These latent dimensions align with indicators of constituent group support, suggesting that each dimension reflects substantively meaningful features of conflict in local electoral politics. These findings suggest that local politics are not completely structured by national-level partisan politics. Future research should aim to measure and understand local conflict along both partisan and market-orientation dimensions.
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To what extent do political campaigns mobilize voters? Despite the central role of campaigns in American politics and despite many experiments on campaigning, we know little about the aggregate effects of an entire campaign on voter participation. Drawing upon inside information from presidential campaigns and utilizing a geographic research design that exploits media markets spanning state boundaries, we estimate the aggregate effects of a large-scale campaign. We estimate that the 2012 presidential campaigns increased turnout in highly targeted states by 7-8 percentage points, on average, indicating that modern campaigns can significantly alter the size and composition of the voting population. Further evidence suggests that the predominant mechanism behind this effect is traditional ground campaigning, which has dramatically increased in scale in the last few presidential elections. Additionally, we find no evidence of diminishing marginal returns to ground campaigning, meaning that voter contacts, each likely exhibiting small individual effects, may aggregate to large effects over the course of a campaign.
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Partnering with twenty-five state parties and the Obama 2012 campaign, we surveyed nearly 4,000 campaign staffers from 200 races during the election season, asking about the expected voteshare in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of electoral closeness can affect how they engage in campaigning and in the representation of citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: incumbent campaigns may irrationally fear close contests; conversely, campaign elites may be over-optimistic of their chances. Building on models of uncertainty, we assess perceptions of closeness. Findings indicate that elites are more optimistic about their chances than they are fearful, and that better-educated elites and elites associated with incumbent and higher-office campaigns are more accurate at assessing their chances. While the public may be better served by politicians fearing defeat, campaigns are typically staffed by workers who are over-confident in their abilities, which may limit the purported benefits of electoral competition.
Supporting Information | Replication Material
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As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign's behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters' priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign.
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Many citizens abstain from the political process, and the reasons for this abstention are of great interest and importance. Most scholars and pundits assume that greater electoral competition and the increased chance of pivotality will motivate citizens to participate. We test this hypothesis through a large-scale field experiment which exploits the rare opportunity of a tied election for major political office. Informing citizens that an upcoming election will be close has little mobilizing effect. To the extent that we do detect an effect, it is concentrated among a small set of frequent voters. Our evidence suggests that increased pivotality is not a solution to low turnout, and the predominant models of turnout focusing on pivotality are of little practical use.
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Numerous get-out-the-vote (GOTV) interventions are successful in raising voter turnout. However, these increases may not be evenly distributed across the electorate and may actually increase the differences between voters and non-voters. This phenomenon is particularly notable given the many GOTV strategies that explicitly aim to reduce inequalities in representation. By analyzing individual level-data, we reassess previous GOTV experiments to determine which interventions mobilize under-represented versus well-represented citizens. We develop a generalized and exportable test which indicates whether a particular intervention reduces or exacerbates disparities in political participation and apply it to 27 previous experimental interventions. Despite raising mean levels of voter turnout, more than two-thirds of the interventions in our sample widened disparities in participation. On average, voter mobilization strategies tend to increase the participation gap, thereby exacerbating representational inequality. We conclude by discussing substantive implications for political representation and methodological implications for experimenters.
Other Topics
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Once a fixture of research in the social and behavioral sciences, volunteer subjects are now only rarely used in human subjects research. Yet volunteers are a potentially valuable resource, especially for research conducted online. We argue that online volunteer laboratories are able to produce high-quality data comparable to that from other online pools. The scalability of volunteer labs means that they can produce large volumes of high-quality data for multiple researchers, while imposing little or no financial burden. Using a range of original tests, we show that volunteer and paid respondents have different motivations for participating in research, but have similar descriptive compositions. Furthermore, volunteer samples are able to replicate classic and contemporary social science findings, and produce high levels of overall response quality comparable to paid subjects. Our results suggest that online volunteer labs represent a potentially significant untapped source of human subjects data.
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Do Justices telegraph their preferences during oral arguments? We demonstrate that Justices implicitly reveal their leanings during oral arguments, even before arguments and deliberations have concluded. Specifically, we extract the emotional content of over 3,000 hours of audio recordings spanning 30 years of oral arguments before the Court. Using only the level of emotional arousal in each of the Justices’ voices during these arguments, as measured by their vocal pitch, we are able to accurately predict many of their eventual votes, while using none of the text or substantive content. These predictions are statistically and practically significant and robust to including a range of controls. Our findings suggest that mannerisms that may be subconscious, such as vocal pitch, carry information that basic legal, political, and textual information do not, and can be used to predict the decisions of even elite political actors.
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This article examines the negative effect fallacy, a flawed statistical argument first utilized by the Warren Court in Elkins v. United States. The Court argued that empirical evidence could not determine whether the exclusionary rule prevents future illegal searches and seizures because “it is never easy to prove a negative,” inappropriately conflating the philosophical and arithmetic definitions of the word negative. Subsequently, the Court has repeated this mistake in other domains, including free speech, voting rights, and campaign finance. The fallacy has also proliferated into the federal circuit and district court levels. Narrowly, our investigation aims to eradicate the use of the negative effect fallacy in federal courts. More broadly, we highlight several challenges and concerns with the increasing use of statistical reasoning in court decisions. As courts continue to evaluate statistical and empirical questions, we recommend that they evaluate the evidence on its own merit rather than relying on convenient arguments embedded in precedent.
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In 2011, the Supreme Court struck down the matching provisions in Arizona's campaign finance law on the grounds that they violate free speech by chilling private spending. In this article, we explicitly test the effects of Arizona's matching provisions in two ways. First, we find that privately funded state legislative candidates do not strategically cluster their spending below the threshold that would trigger money to their opponents. Second, we exploit a 2010 Court injunction as a natural experiment. When Arizona's matching provisions were removed, private spending did not increase relative to other states. Contrary to the view of the Court, we find no empirical evidence that campaign finance laws chill private political speech. More generally, our analysis demonstrates the value of exploiting court injunctions as natural experiments to assess the causal effects of laws.
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We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces. We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. Combining survey data with our facial quality scores and a measure of contest competitiveness, we find a face quality effect for Senate challengers of about 4 points for independent voters and 1 to 3 points for partisans. While we estimate face effects that could potentially matter in close elections, we find that the challenging candidate's face is never the difference between a challenger and incumbent victory in all 99 Senate elections in our study.
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The study of intergroup attitudes is a central topic across the social sciences. While there is little doubt about the importance of intergroup attitudes in shaping behavior, both the psychological underpinnings of these attitudes and the tools used to measure them remain contentious. Modern racism scales, which are the most common way to measure anti-Black prejudice in political science, were created in response to a shift in the attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans, and reflect a mix of social conservatism and anti-Black affect. Using experiments, we offer evidence that modern racism scales measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African Americans alone. In the spirit of the original motivation behind modern racism scales, which were created to capture changing public opinion about race, we suggest this property of modern racism may reflect a change in how stereotypes about low work-ethic are applied across groups and that the target of resentment for white Americans, especially for political conservatives, has broadened beyond African Americans. Our results suggest that modern racism scales reflect a general set of attitudes about fairness and that new instruments may be needed to measure group-specific prejudice.