Generative AI that can produce realistic text, images, and other human-like outputs is currently transforming many different industries. Yet it is not yet known how such tools might influence social science research. I argue Generative AI has the potential to improve survey research, online… read more about this publication »
Machine learning (ML) methods are proliferating in scientific research. However, the adoption of these methods has been accompanied by failures of validity, reproducibility, and generalizability. These failures can hinder scientific progress, lead to false consensus around invalid claims, and… read more about this publication »
When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape… read more about this publication »
Many international agreements, from routine trade deals to high-stakes nuclear agreements, are negotiated in secret. However, we have a limited understanding of how secrecy in a negotiation shapes attitudes towards the agreement. Public opinion matters because it informs government decisions about… read more about this publication »
We argue that education’s effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We… read more about this publication »
This article analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of… read more about this publication »
What motivates private firms’ willingness to invest in green technologies and environmentally friendly operations? Some emphasize enhanced government regulation and enforcement, while others point to the greater potential of societal pressure. In this study, we use a survey experiment with more… read more about this publication »
The secretive, illegal, multidimensional, and ubiquitous nature of corruption leads to formidable difficulties in research design and measurement. When research fails to account for these challenges, it can lead to an empirical misalignment with concepts and theories of corruption, with inferential… read more about this publication »
Volunteer-based voter contact presents multiple potential principal-agent problems for political campaigns. Conflicting potential solutions to these principal-agent problems generate two opposing expectations about campaigns’ preferences for ideological types of volunteers. Concerns about… read more about this publication »
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a flashpoint of elite political discord, yet how Americans actually perceive CRT is unclear. We theorize that Republican elites utilized a strong framing strategy to re-define CRT as an empty signifier representing broader racial and cultural grievances. Using… read more about this publication »
In many survey settings, population counts or percentages are available for some of the variables in the survey, for example, from censuses, administrative databases, or other high-quality surveys. We present a model-based approach to utilize such auxiliary marginal distributions in multiple… read more about this publication »
Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent's response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive… read more about this publication »
Can culture constrain policy implementation - and if so, under what conditions and for whom? In this paper, we test to what extent traditional values of numerology in China impeded the environmental benefits of a well-designed license plate policy. We take advantage of two natural experiments in… read more about this publication »
Cohort replacement - the replacement in a population of older cohorts by their successors who developed under different conditions - is an important process behind cultural change. Research on public opinion indicates that a large proportion of aggregate change is the result of cohort replacement… read more about this publication »
How do foreign rivals perceive and respond to heightened domestic polarization in the United States? The conventional thinking is that polarization weakens and distracts the United States, emboldening its adversaries. However, untested assumptions underlie this claim. We use two strategies to… read more about this publication »
When faced with a common threat, states have various alignment choices. Formal alliances offer explicit military obligations of support. Others, such as the Triple Entente that preceded World War I, are more ambiguous understandings. These entente-like alignments make no formal pledges of armed… read more about this publication »
A large literature considers the mid-century a key turning point in punitive public opinion in the United States. This article examines racial and geographic heterogeneity in changing public opinion during the mid-century using data on death penalty support from as early as 1953. I find that the… read more about this publication »
Theoretical and empirical research on causes and consequences of defense spending is plentiful. Most of this research uses ‘top line’ defense spending data, either as a share of GDP or as a raw monetary figure. Empirical research has been limited, however, by the ‘blunt’ nature of this data, which… read more about this publication »
Can a political party spend enough across electoral campaigns to garner a majority within the U.S. Congress? Prior research on campaign spending minimizes the importance of campaign heterogeneity and fails to aggregate effects across campaigns, rendering it unable to address this question. Instead… read more about this publication »
Even amid the unprecedented public health challenges attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic, opposition to vaccinating against the novel coronavirus has been both prevalent and politically contentious in American public life. In this paper, we theorize that attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination… read more about this publication »
Existing research maintains that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are reluctant to seek information that might help mitigate risk. We challenge this convention by proposing that perceptions of risks associated with global economic shocks can incentivize some disadvantaged individuals to… read more about this publication »