Dissertation Project
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| Politicized Change: How Local Reactions to the Post-Katrina Migration Were Shaped by the Media |
Under review |
| This paper uses the post-Katrina migration as a source of exogenous variation to explore the impact of changing demographics on a variety of political attitudes and behaviors. |
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| Threatening Changes: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition |
Under review |
| Testing a novel theory of contextual effects, this paper shows that immigrants are construed as threatening under two conditions: when a sudden influx of immigrants has arrived in a community, and when national frames are available to politicize their arrival. |
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| The Diversity Discount: How Increasing Ethnic and Racial Diversity Dampens Support for Tax Increases |
Being revised for resubmission |
| Using a unique data set on tax votes in Massachusetts communitites, this paper demonstrates that sudden increases in diversity can dampen the provision of public goods by reducing the number of long-term projects put before voters. |
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Methods
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| The Constraining Power of International Treaties: Theory and Methods |
| American Political Science Review, co-authored with Beth Simmons |
| Owing to self-selection, estimating treaty effects is challenging. This paper argues that treaties can both screen among states and then constrain those states that become signatories. It uses propensity score matching, and finds that signing onto the International Monetary Fund's Article VIII has a marked impact on signatories' behavior. For replication code and data, click here. |
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Extracting Systematic Social Science Meaning from Text |
Under Review, co-authored with Gary King |
| This paper develops and presents two methods of automated content analysis that give approximately unbiased estimates of quantities of theoretical interest to social scientists. These methods are then applied to data on thousands of web logs about the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. |
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Other Papers on Political Behavior and Local Politics
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| Partisan Reinforcement and the Poor: The Impact of Context on Attitudes Toward Poverty |
Being revised for resubmission |
| Can contextual factors shape attitudes toward the poor? Synthesizing racial and political theories of contextual effects, this paper explores attitudes about who is to blame for poverty. It demonstrates that both an area's racial composition and its partisan composition can influence respondents' views about why people are poor. |
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| Inactive by Design: The Elements of Suburban Sprawl that Reduce Political Participation |
Under Review, co-authored with Thad Williamson |
| Suburban communities in the U.S. have sometimes been condemned for their lack of civic engagement. This article takes a critical look at such criticisms, and uses data on nearly 30,000 Americans and their communities to demonstrate that certain aspects of suburban sprawl do dampen political participation. |
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| Discounting Politics: The Impact of Large Retailers on American Communities |
| Wal-Mart and other large retailers have been heavily criticized for their impact on American communities, but social scientists have been slow to explore just how real those impacts are. This working paper uses matching and hierarchical modeling approaches to estimate how large retailers reshape the civic life of the communities they enter. |
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Reports
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| Responding in Good Faith: A Report to the Ash Institute on the Response to Hurricane Katrina |
| Hurricane Katrina sent hundreds of thousands of evacuees to communities across the country. This report details how Arkansas used church-based networks to assist the evacuees, and compares that response to those in Houston and Baton Rouge. |
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| Updated March 20, 2008. Website Template Courtesy of Interspire |
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