This pagre provides an overview of my working papers and ongoing research projects
Book Projects
Partisan Poll Watchers and Americans' Trust in Elections (with Mollie J. Cohen)
This book examines how partisan poll watchers shape Americans’ views of, and trust in, elections. Drawing on a mix of original survey, experimental, and administrative data, we address three central questions about partisan election observation in the United States: (1) to what degree the public is aware of these actors, (2) what effects the public believes they have on elections, and (3) under what conditions poll watchers boost trust in elections. Results from this work show that these routine and understudied features of American elections meaningfully shape confidence in the electoral process.
Survey Experiments in Political Science (with Scott Clifford and Carlisle Rainey)
This book offers a comprehensive, evidence-based guide to designing and analyzing survey experiments in political science and related fields. Aimed at researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, it will lead readers through the process of designing a survey experiment, including developing treatments to selecting an appropriate experimental design and choosing a sample. Throughout, it draws on evidence from recent research to illustrate how to most effectively design survey experiments and provides readers with practical, actionable guidance they can use in their own research.
Working Papers
Non-Compliance Can Bias Estimates of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects (with Scott Clifford)
As survey experiments have grown in popularity, social scientists increasingly seek to understand for whom a treatment is most effective. However, we argue that these common tests typically overlook an important potential source of bias – non-compliance. When examining heterogeneity in the intent-to-treat effect, heterogeneous treatment effects may occur due to differential effects of the treatment, or due to differential compliance with the treatment. Scholars typically assume the former, but do not test for the latter. In this paper, we detail the logic of this problem, illustrating several forms of non-compliance and why they might be related to common moderators. Then, in two studies, we demonstrate how unexamined non-compliance can bias estimates of heterogeneous treatment effects, even in the case of hypothetical scenarios. We conclude with advice on how to minimize, diagnose, and account for non-compliance in survey experimental designs.
Cutting off Your Nose to Spite Your Face: Incurring Personal Loss to Ensure that Immigrants Lose (with Yuna Blajer de la Garza and Roberto F. Carlos)
This article aims to better understand how attitudes about immigrants shape Americans’ preferences on policies not obviously related to immigration. Through a set of experiments, we find that White Americans who support public policies widely beneficial to them and others—investment in local businesses, housing, and public schooling—withdraw their support for those policies once they learn that immigrants may also stand to benefit from them. Further, participants are willing to forgo monetary bonuses to deny benefits to immigrants. To make sense of these seemingly irrational stances, we draw from the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that White workers in the 19th century United States derived a special kind of respect and social standing from their whiteness—a “psychological wage of whiteness”—which they sought to preserve even at the cost of immediate material benefits.
Judges as Participants in Democracy (with Christina L. Boyd, David Cottrell, and Albert H. Yoon)
U.S. judges do not leave their “citizenship” aside when they join the judiciary. But do these judges participate in democracy in ways that are distinct from other citizens? To examine this, we study whether judges turn out to vote at higher-than-average rates than other people in the U.S. during general and primary elections and what factors explain within-judge variation in turnout rates during primary elections. We connect, for the first time, turnout behavior literature and theory to federal judges and collect original data on over 1,000 federal district and circuit judges’ turnout behavior in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections. Our empirical analysis reveals that federal judges vote at significantly higher rates than average voters in both general and primary elections and that factors related to judges’ assessment of the value of their vote, attachment or connection to politics and campaigning, and prior professional experience help explain a judge’s choice to participate in primary voting.
How Partisanship and Elections Shape Satisfaction with U.S. Democracy (with Logan Dancey, Ethan Brill-Cass, and Natália de Paula Moreira).
In this paper, we analyze a mix of closed- and open-ended questions about satisfaction with U.S. democracy on national, cross-sectional surveys fielded through YouGov pre- and post-election in 2022. We find a notable increase in satisfaction with democracy in the U.S. following the 2022 elections. We also probe what considerations Americans say they use when answering questions about democratic satisfaction through analysis of the text of open-ended responses where respondents wrote about what came to mind when answering the question. The text analysis uncovers partisan differences in the words and topics discussed, with Democrats focusing more on electoral considerations such as gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and voter suppression, while Republicans focused on the media, justice system, and voter fraud. Partisans also frequently invoked the other party and its leaders when asked about democratic satisfaction. The results speak to debates over the meaning of survey measures of democratic satisfaction and the partisan divide over how democracy is evaluated in the United States.