"How Many Americans Change Their Racial Identification over Time?" 2022. Socius.
Abstract: Despite long-standing assumptions about racial identity as a fixed characteristic, social scientists have increasingly recognized its fluidity and examined the origins of micro-level race change. However, knowledge regarding the prevalence of race change is limited. This data visualization fills this descriptive gap by providing a comprehensive account of recent levels of racial self-identification change among Americans. The author uses five high-quality panel surveys in which race is asked of the same nationally representative adult samples several years apart. Among all respondents, race change rates range from 5 percent to 12 percent across surveys, averaging 8 percent. Original white identifiers (4 percent on average) are much less prone to change than initial nonwhites collectively (20 percent). Blacks have as stable identities as whites, while mixed-race (52 percent) and "other"-race (73 percent) Americans undergo substantial identity shifts over time. Results further cement a perspective of race as flexible for some in the United States.
"Disfavor or Favor? Assessing the Valence of White Americans' Racial Attitudes" (with John Carey, Yusaku Horiuchi, and Timothy Ryan). 2023. Quarterly Journal of Political Science. [SSRN], [EGAP prereg]
Abstract: When individuals' racial attitudes are associated with their judgments related to race---for example, when people with more negative attitudes toward Blacks are less likely to vote for a Black political candidate---existing studies routinely interpret it as evidence of prejudice against minorities. But theoretically, such associations can represent favoring minorities, disfavoring them, or a combination of both. We provide a conceptual framework to distinguish patterns of favoring and disfavoring against a standard of racial indifference, and test it with a pre-registered conjoint experiment. In our results, one widely-used measure---the Racial Resentment Scale (RRS)---captures favoring of Blacks substantially more than disfavoring. This finding calls for greater care in characterizing white Americans' racial attitudes and illustrates ways to improve future research designs. We also describe several extensions that integrate the distinction between favoring and disfavoring into the broader study of racial attitudes.
"Changing Votes, Changing Identities? Racial Fluidity and Vote Switching in the 2012-2016 US Presidential Elections" (with Dean Lacy). 2021. Public Opinion Quarterly. [SSRN]
Abstract: Although racial identity is usually assumed to be unchanging, recent research shows otherwise. The role of politics in racial identification change has received little attention. Using panel data with waves around two recent presidential elections, this paper reveals survey evidence of racial fluidity and its strong relationship with vote switching patterns. Across several models and robust to various controls, switching from a non-Republican vote in 2012 to a 2016 Republican vote (i.e., non-Romney to Trump) significantly predicts nonwhite to white race change. Among nonwhites who did not vote Republican in 2012, switching to a Republican vote in 2016 increases the probability of adopting a white racial identity from a 0.03 baseline to 0.49 (1539% increase). Individuals originally identifying as Mixed and Hispanic drive this identity-voting link. A parallel dynamic on the Democratic side (new Democratic voters moving from white to nonwhite identities) does not occur. The systematic relationship between Trump switching and white identity adoption is unlikely to be spurious or due to measurement error, does not appear for the 2008-2012 election period, and makes theoretical sense in light of 2016 campaign rhetoric and trends in political-social identity alignment.
"Party-Race Linkages and Racial Fluidity." In progress.
"Hispanic Identity Attrition and Understandings of Group Political Behavior." In progress.
"Discrimination and Racial Fluidity." In progress.
"Latinos in the House? Demographic Change, Ethnic Attrition, and Latino Political Behavior" (with Marcel F. Roman and Alex Flores). In progress.
"Assimilation or Racialization? Intergenerational Ethnic Attrition Among Hispanics and Asians in the U.S." (with René D. Flores and Edward Telles). In progress.
"Performing Race" (with Omar Wasow). In progress.
"Measures of Racial Identity and their Implications for Political Behavior" (with Lauren Davenport and Taeku Lee). In progress.
"When Do Partisans Stop Following the Leader?" 2020. Political Communication. [SSRN], [EGAP prereg]
Abstract: Evidence of public opinion blindly following political leader rhetoric has important implications for the scope of elite influence and normative democratic concerns. Past research, however, does not test the strength of real world leader cues amid signals that conflict with a leader's policy message, and thus has not gauged the robustness of the ``follow-the-leader'' dynamic. The current study explores whether two different conflicting signals---1) opposing intra-party Congressional elite cues and 2) negative policy information that gives compelling reasons to oppose a policy---attenuate leader influence in support of a realistic counter-stereotypical policy. A national survey experiment with two parallel partisan designs shows that individuals follow their leader to a substantial degree whether or not conflicting signals are present. Conflicting co-party elite cues do not attenuate leader influence among Republicans. For Democrats, although they weaken amid opposition, leader cues still shape mass opinion sizably. Providing substantially more information about the policy at hand does not make either partisan group much less likely to follow their leader, a finding that holds regardless of individuals' preexisting ideology in the policy area. Results demonstrate the broad conditions under which ``follow-the-leader'' behavior holds and reveal a stronger nature of elite influence than previously understood. Party elites and information fail to effectively constrain the sway of prominent leaders, who have considerable latitude in positions they can take without losing mass support.
"Has Trump Damaged U.S. Image Abroad? Decomposing the Effects of Policy Messages on Foreign Public Opinion" (with Yusaku Horiuchi). 2020. Political Behavior. [SSRN], [EGAP prereg]
Abstract: The U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently made foreign countries central to his political messages, often conveying animosity. But do foreign citizens react more to the speaker of these messages---Trump himself---or their content? More generally, when people are exposed to messages sent from foreign countries, are their attitudes influenced by information heuristics or information content in messages? Although related studies are abundant in the literature of American public opinion, these questions are not fully examined in the literature of foreign public opinion. To address them, we used Japan as a case and fielded a survey experiment exposing citizens to U.S. policy messages that varied by source, policy content, and issue salience. Results suggest that while the source cue (Trump attribution) causes negative perceptions of the U.S., the policy content (cooperative vs. uncooperative) has a larger effect in shaping opinion of the U.S. Furthermore, analysis of interaction effects shows that only when U.S. policy approach is uncooperative does the Trump attribution have significantly negative and large effects. We conclude that foreign citizens rely more on policy content in transnational opinion formation---an aspect that past research in this area has overlooked. Substantively, these findings may demonstrate that even under a presidency that has alienated foreign countries and seemingly undermined U.S. stature in the world, foreign opinion toward the U.S. does not hinge entirely on its political leader. In short, Trump has not irreparably damaged the U.S. image abroad.
"Ground Truth Validation of Survey Estimates of Split-Ticket Voting with Cast Vote Records Data" (with Jonathan Robinson). In progress. [SSRN]
Abstract: From signaling trends in nationalization and partisanship to clarifying preferences for divided government, split-ticket voting has received copious attention in political science. Important insights often rely on survey data, as they do among practitioners searching for persuadable voters. Yet it is unknown whether surveys accurately capture this behavior. We take advantage of a novel source of data to validate survey-based estimates of split-ticket voting. Cast vote records in South Carolina (2010-18) and Maryland (2016-18) provide anonymized individual level choices in all races on the ballot for every voter in each election, serving as the ground truth. We collect an array of public and private survey data to execute the comparison and calculate survey error. Despite expectations about partisan consistency pressures leading to survey underestimates, we find that surveys generally come close to the true split-ticket voting rates in our set of races. Accuracy varies, but notably is more consistent for split-ticket voting in a given dyad of national races (e.g., President vs. U.S. House) than in one with state races, as the former is often of greater interest in research and practice.
"Policy Trust and Elite Influence on Public Opinion." In progress.
"Presidential Candidate Rhetoric on Race and Identity." In progress.
"Elite Cues and Popular Apolitical Issues: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time." Unpublished paper. [SSRN]
"American election results at the precinct level" (with Samuel Baltz, Charles Stewart III, and other MIT Election Lab members). 2022. Nature Scientific Data.
Abstract: We describe the creation and quality assurance of a dataset containing nearly all available precinct-level election results from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 American elections. Precincts are the smallest level of election administration, and election results at this granularity are needed to address many important questions. However, election results are individually reported by each state with little standardization or data quality assurance. We have collected, cleaned, and standardized precinct-level election results from every available race above the very local level in almost every state across the last three national election years. Our data include nearly every candidate for president, US Congress, governor, or state legislator, and hundreds of thousands of precinct-level results for judicial races, other statewide races, and even local races and ballot initiatives. In this article we describe the process of finding this information and standardizing it. Then we aggregate the precinct-level results up to geographies that have official totals, and show that our totals never differ from the official nationwide data by more than 0.457%.
"A Platform Penalty for News? How Social Media Context Can Alter Information Credibility Online" (with Brendan Nyhan and Dartmouth undergraduate students). 2023. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. [EGAP prereg]
Abstract: Growing concern about dubious information online threatens the credibility of legitimate news. We examine two possible mechanisms for this effect on social media. First, people might view all news on social media as less credible. Second, questionable information elsewhere in a news feed might discredit legitimate news coverage. Findings from a preregistered experiment confirm that people see information on Facebook as less credible than identical information on news websites, though the effect is small, suggesting that observational data overstates this platform penalty. Prior exposure to low (versus high) credibility information on Facebook also reduces engagement with a target article, but not its perceived credibility. However, exploratory analyses show that the effects of prior exposure to low credibility information vary depending on the plausibility of the target article, decreasing the credibility of a less plausible article (a spillover effect) but increasing the credibility of a more plausible one (a contrast effect).
"Counting the Pinocchios: The Effect of Summary Fact-Checking Data on Perceived Accuracy and Favorability of Politicians" (with Brendan Nyhan and seminar classmates). 2019. Research & Politics. [Preprint + EGAP prereg]
Abstract: Can the media effectively hold politicians accountable for making false claims? Journalistic fact-checking assesses the accuracy of individual public statements by public officials, but less is known about whether this process effectively imposes reputational costs on misinformation-prone politicians who repeatedly make false claims. This study therefore explores the effects of exposure to summaries of fact-check ratings, a new format that presents a more comprehensive assessment of politician statement accuracy over time. Across three survey experiments, we compare the effects of negative individual statement ratings and summary fact-checking data on favorability and perceived statement accuracy of two prominent elected officials. As predicted, summary fact-checking has a greater effect on politician perceptions than does individual fact-checking. Notably, we do not observe the expected pattern of motivated reasoning: co-partisans are not consistently more resistant than are supporters of the opposition party. Our findings suggest that summary fact-checking is particularly effective at holding politicians accountable for misstatements.
"Salient Role Models and the Political Engagement Gender Gap." In progress.