When Differences Divide: Research Project
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| Politicized Places: 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 |
Journal of Politics |
| 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. Click here for the online appendix, and here for replication data and code. |
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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 |
Forthcoming, American Journal of Political Science, 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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Improving Anchoring Vignettes: Designing Surveys to Correct Interpersonal Incomparability |
Under Review, co-authored with Gary King |
| This paper uses survey experiments to develop insights about how to design surveys with anchoring vignettes. It shows that placing vignettes prior to a self-assessment question can prime respondents, improving the measurement of the underlying concept. It also develops advice for survey questions that ask respondents to compare themselves to others. |
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Papers on Political Behavior and Local Politics
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| No Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates |
Forthcoming, Journal of Politics |
| Analysts have commonly discussed the "Wilder effect," the gap between how black candidates poll and how they perform on election day. Testing these claims on all elections for Senator or Governor from 1989 to 2006, this paper finds that the Wilder effect disappeared for black candidates by the mid-1990s. And female candidates never suffered from a polling-performance gap. The corresponding data sets are available here. |
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| Partisan Reinforcement and the Poor: The Impact of Context on Attitudes toward Poverty |
Forthcoming, Social Science Quarterly |
| 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. For replication code and information on obtaining the data, click here.
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| Racial Contexts' Enduring Influence on Attitudes toward Poverty |
Forthcoming, Social Science Quarterly |
| A reply, this article extends the original evidence that racial contexts--and not certain other contextual measures--shape attitudes toward poverty. It then presents new evidence from an exogenous demographic shock to reinforce the claim that racial contexts shape views of the 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 October 26, 2008. Website Template Courtesy of Interspire |
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