Recent Publications

Thompson, Andrew Ifedapo, and Stefan D. McCabe. "The importance of local racial demographic changes in democratic erosion in the mass American public." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 48 (2025): e2501150122.

Violent sentiment is deeply tied to racial threat from the changing racial demography of the United States. Extending the historical idea of White flight, we find shifting local racial demographic conditions in tandem with a simple prime of national conditions causally drive more violent, antidemocratic attitudes across White Americans. We term this as “White fight sentiment.” Across four experiments conducted over the span of 3 y, using probability, state targeted, and convenience samples, we find that when we randomly prime national diversification among White Americans in locations that experienced local Black population increase or White decline, they become expressively, consistently more extreme when primed. Surprisingly, we consistently find null effects in communities that recently experienced Hispanic and Asian population change, short of one case across our four studies. Through a series of robustness checks we confirm national considerations specifically activate White fight.

Busby, Ethan C., Andrew Ifedapo Thompson, and Suzy Yi. "Do they even care? Empirical evidence for the importance of listening in democracy." Political Communication (2025): 1-20.

What role does listening play in the minds of American citizens? We test key theoretical ideas about listening in contemporary US politics: that listening should be a part of a wide range of political attitudes and considerations, that listening should be defined by citizens in terms of fair consideration, and that listening should have a significant impact on evaluations of government officials. We begin with open-ended questions on salient political topics to present evidence that Americans often think about listening as they think about important features of democratic politics. This is true when discussing different topics (such as responsiveness, extremism, and political problems) and across different parts of the American polity (the public, experts, and politicians). We then document how Americans define listening through the use of open-ended data, finding that Americans frequently think of listening as fair consideration of others’ ideas. Extending these findings with a conjoint experiment, we demonstrate that citizens react to listening from elected officials with more favorability and support in ways that are more powerful than other standard predictors (like policy responsiveness, partisanship, and shared group membership). After these analyses, we end with a discussion of how political science and politics broadly can benefit from an increased focus on listening.

Busby, Ethan C., Andrew Ifedapo Thompson, Tomo Vierbuchen, and Suzy Yi. "Unheard Voices: The Importance of Intersectionality in Responsiveness and the Systematic Ignoring of Black Men by Elected Officials." Political Behavior (2025): 1-27.

All citizens are not listened to equally, despite the importance of responsiveness and listening to different theories of democracy. We take an ‌intersectional‌ ‌approach‌ ‌to‌ make several novel predictions about how citizens’ identities, the topic of constituent messages, and the identities of elected officials combine to influence responsiveness. These theories lead us to expect (and empirically confirm) that Black men in particular - more than other racial and gender groups - are systematically ignored by elected officials. ‌We‌ ‌implement‌ ‌a‌ ‌wide-scale‌ experiment with U.S. local elected officials ‌(N = 23,738)‌ to test our predictions. Extending‌ ‌previous‌ ‌work,‌ ‌we‌ ‌vary‌ ‌the‌ ‌race,‌ ‌gender,‌ ‌and‌ ‌topic‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌constituent’s‌ ‌message, and we‌ observe ‌if elected‌ ‌officials ‌both open‌ ‌and‌ ‌reply‌ ‌to‌ ‌constituents’ messages‌.‌ ‌We ‌find‌ ‌that‌ ‌Black‌ ‌men‌ ‌are systematically ignored, regardless of the message they send.‌ ‌In‌ ‌contrast,‌ ‌elected officials respond less to ‌Black‌ ‌women‌ ‌when‌ they ‌discuss race ‌and‌ ‌less to ‌White‌ ‌women‌ ‌when‌ ‌they discuss gender.‌ ‌We‌ ‌discuss ‌the‌ ‌implications‌ ‌of‌ ‌this‌ ‌study‌ ‌for‌ ‌work‌ ‌on‌ ‌responsiveness‌ ‌in‌ democratic government.‌‌