Dissertation Book Project: "Activists in Time: From Intense Preferences to Local Political Participation"
Job Market Paper: "Angry Yet Optimistic: From Grievances to Politicization for Change"
Abstract: Why do citizens participate in local politics? Under what conditions are marginalized individuals mobilized, especially when rational calculations of political gains are unlikely to trump the costs of political participation? I answer these questions in the context of local housing politics, where the existing legal and legislative framework creates uneven participation costs for more vulnerable groups, such as tenants, to effectively engage in local politics. I demonstrate how beliefs of structural injustice, stemming from past grievances and proximal contact by those of others, politicize ordinary citizens and marginalized communities. Conceptualizing political participation as a broad spectrum, I develop a two-step “preference to participation” framework that utilizes status quo preferences and the concept of preference intensity to explain the micro-foundations of mobilization. By separating the effects of grievances on preference formation from its effect on barriers to political action, I join authors including Kurer et al. (2019) in further clarifying the countervailing mobilizing and demobilizing effects of grievances as presented in the literature of social movements and political behavior.
In this paper, I argue that grievances such as personal and/or proximal contact of dispossession and displacement, favor mobilization only if such experiences contribute to the development of ethical beliefs, such as the need to address structural housing injustice or inequality. To illustrate with a simple example, a tenant living in disrepair is unlikely to take action if she merely considers herself unlucky to have a irresponsible landlord. Instead, sometimes through multiple unsuccessful attempts of holding the landlord accountable for his or her action, the tenant attributes her experiences to how the system is in reality allowing the landlord to take advantage of tenants and become a bad actor. In this case, she is more likely to be politicized and take action if political opportunities arise. At the micro-level, grievances can increase individuals’ barriers to participation, even if the individual is already politicized; however, this effect can be mitigated by organizing efforts from housing rights and community groups.
Following McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001), I aim to examine comparatively whether the proposed mechanism drive changes in substantively divergent local regimes. I adopt a mixed-method approach with interviews and survey experiments to test my theory with selected cities in three country sites: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. This selection reflects diverse political and institutional context regarding the rental market, local political institutions, and political opportunities structures as used by many social movement scholars. Here, I consider each interlocutor, who is an active participant of local politics in urban and suburban contexts, as a single case. This work builds on the intersection of collective action, social movement, American racial and ethnic politics, political behavior and psychology, while offering a dynamic view of political participation and organizing through the lens of local housing politics. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with an oral history component on each interlocutor’s path to activism, I present an analytical framework that emphasizes how personal histories, time horizons, and agenda-setting power politicize individuals and ultimately lead to political action.
Citations:
Kurer, Thomas, et al. “Economic Grievances and Political Protest.” European Journal of Political Research, vol. 58, no. 3, 2019, pp. 866–92. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12318.
McAdam, Doug, et al. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805431.
Publication (Letter) "Listwise Deletion in High Dimensions" (with P Aronow) . Political Analysis. 2023;31(1):149-155. doi:10.1017/pan.2022.5
Abstract: We consider the properties of listwise deletion when both n and the number of variables grow large. We show that when (i) all data have some idiosyncratic missingness and (ii) the number of variables grows superlogarithmically in n, then, for large n, listwise deletion will drop all rows with probability 1. Using two canonical datasets from the study of comparative politics and international relations, we provide numerical illustration that these problems may emerge in real-world settings. These results suggest that, in practice, using listwise deletion may mean using few of the variables available to the researcher.
Working Paper: "Energy Burden & Satisfaction with Democracy: The Political Consequences of Market Risk in Germany" (with Laura Kettel)
Abstract: Recent years have seen steep increases in energy costs for households. To date, research on the political consequences of this emergent risk is limited. To explore this relationship for the context of Germany, we leverage an instrumental variable design, drawing on zip-code level data on energy prices, household expenditures, and individual political attitudes. We present causal evidence that rising energy costs contribute to decreased satisfaction with democracy (SWD). We argue that energy prices affect individuals through increasing perceived housing burden, which affects perceptions of social protection. By centering the consequences of household energy cost, we contribute to existing lines of research investigating the relationship between perceptions of economic well-being and SWD for the specific context of energy markets. The political implications of rising energy prices will likely become increasingly salient in the future, as governments tackle the challenge of designing socially just energy transition policies.
Working Paper "On the Role of Social Factors in Housing Preferences: The Grenfell Tower Fire" [Working paper available upon request]
Abstract: Literature on individual policy preferences has primarily focused on the level of various geographical units, with less attention paid to the local level politics that are closer to the voters’ day-to-day life. This paper analyzes citizen housing preferences and navigates changes to the public discourse after national tragedies by showing how a tragic council housing fire in Britain can have a negative-awakening shock to private renters from an interrupted time series design, motivated by the unexpected nature of the Grenfell Tower fire. Showing that multiple resident groups respond differently to the national tragedy, this paper draws on the concept of “security net” to explain information updating in individuals by natural events.
Working paper: "A Simple Approach for Handling Missing Data" [Available upon request]
Abstract: Missing data in both outcomes and in explanatory variables is prevalent in quantitative empirical political science. This paper considers the properties of a simple procedure to address missingness: dropping observations with missing outcomes, and using indicator variables for any missingness in explanatory variables. We show that this approach is motivated by a missing not at random (MNAR) assumption, in contrast to the two commonly adopted approaches of listwise-deletion and multiple imputation. The key intuition of this practice is that it treats missingness of predictor variables as informative. We provide three reanalysis examples of work in the domain of international political economy to demonstrate efficiency improvement in comparison to listwise deletion. The reanalyses include two studies where the three missingness approaches agree and a situation when they do not. We recommend empirical scholars to report results under multiple approaches when they do not possess knowledge about the underlying data generating process.
Work in Progress:
Unequal Voices in Urban Development: A Text Analysis of Property Bias in Municipal Government Meetings (with Menglin Liu)