Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

In September 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly redrew 57 state house districts in 28 counties by holding several lottery machine drawings that randomly picked from among various computer-simulated districting maps. These randomly chosen districting maps were then combined together and used as base maps for the state’s new House of Representatives districting plan, enacted by the General Assembly on September 17, 2019. In this paper, I analyze these randomly chosen maps from the 2019 lottery to assess the causal effect of districts’ partisan composition on voter participation. I find that electorally competitive districts cause an overall increase in voter turnout. However, voters exhibit even higher turnout increases when they are placed into a district that slightly favors their own preferred party. Republican voters are most likely to turn out when their district is electorally competitive but Republican-leaning. Likewise, Democratic voters exhibit the highest turnout rates when they are placed into Democratic-leaning districts that are still competitive. Together, these results illustrate how the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts can significantly skew the partisan composition of the turnout electorate.

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Pyar Seth presents on a book that is an intellectual history of medical diagnoses that have been used to ‘explain away’ concerns about racialized fatalities that occur in state custody, dating from roughly the 1960s to the present. “Many of the diagnoses that I examine throughout the project (i.e. excited delirium, ganja psychosis, vegan syndrome) are not recognized by the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the like. Yet, these conditions still appear in autopsies, toxicology reports, death certificates, and state inquests into ‘suspicious deaths’ across the United States, Canada, Britain, and the West Indies, prompting the question: How does the medicalization of racial violence travel across the boundaries of the nation-state and what might we say about a kind of transatlantic pathologization of Black life and death? Proponents as well as skeptical members of these diagnoses oftentimes frame their concerns around the same question: Are these ‘real’ biomedical conditions? However, I argue that limiting our engagement to this question misses an opportunity to assess the constitutive relations through which medical concepts come into view and the logics that makes certain medical determinations possible. Methodologically, I blend diasporic theory with archival and ethnographic methods to understand how various biomedical practices — autopsy observations, clinical trials, medical case files, and toxicology test values — work together to infringe upon our lives and produce inequitable life chances. From these documentary techniques, I hope to craft new ways for social scientists and historians of medicine to think about the construction of biomedical accounts, the use of epidemiological information, and the transnational complexities of our healthcare systems.”

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Recent evidence from across the Global South finds that community policing does not improve citizen trust or reduce crime (Blair et al 2021). We report results from a series of experiments in a rural part of the Philippines to explore why reforms which have been widely hailed in industrialized settings fail to yield similar results in the Global South. We randomized a community policing intervention across 198 villages, and randomized the assignment of police officers across treated and untreated villages. Results suggest that citizens initially responded positively to the program and increased reporting of information to the police, but the police failed to use the information in ways that resolved citizens’ safety concerns due to a mismatch in priorities. Moreover, while police officers assigned to safe areas developed more positive attitudes about the community, officers assigned to implement community policing in particularly dangerous areas became less trusting of citizens. We draw on this and other evidence to develop an inductive theory of police-community relations and the co-production of public safety. Even when citizens and the police have positive intentions, community policing which generates citizen-police contact can inadvertently cause both sides to learn negative information about the other over time, undermining reform efforts.

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Building a strong and effective state requires revenue. Yet, in many low-income countries, citizens do not make formal payments to the state, or forego engaging with the state altogether, due to vulnerability to opportunistic demands by state agents. We study two randomized interventions in Kinshasa, DRC designed to empower citizens in their negotiations with opportunistic state agents: one provided information about statutory payment obligations, the other offered protection from abusive officials. We examine the effects not only on citizen payment amounts (intensive margin effects) but also on whether citizens start making formal payments, or any payments, to the state (extensive margin effects). We find that protection, and to a lesser extent information, had clear extensive margin effects, increasing the share of citizens making formal payments and engaging with the state. These findings show how empowering citizens can help countries transition away from a low revenue, low engagement equilibrium.

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Politics is often marked by tragedy, and in an increasingly interconnected world we are regularly exposed to the emotions of others in response to such tragedy. In this paper I argue emotions are a form of information: When we observe someone express a negative emotion about a political event, we can infer (1) the event is worth being concerned about, (2) the expressor is simply and emotional person, and/or (3) the expressor is trying to manipulate others with their (feigned or exaggerated) emotional expression. I focus specifically on emotional expression about public risks: potentially life-threatening and politically relevant problems like wildfires or pandemics. I propose and test dimensions both between and within risks that affect whether emotional expression persuades others to support government intervention to address the public risk, rather than causing observers to dismiss the expressor as simply emotional or manipulative. Central to these is perceptions of harm caused by the risk, both on average and to the person expressing their emotions. Advances in textual and visual data analyses have provided new tools in identifying the prevalence of emotional expression across media sources, and this work begins to offer a theoretical foundation for the inferences observers make when faced with the emotional expression of others.​

Although the root causes of partisan affective polarization in the United States — increasing aversion toward members of the out-party among Democrats and Republicans — are numerous, biased mental representations of those in people’s own and the opposing political party may contribute to affective polarization. Importantly, existing studies measure perceptions about the parties using either self-reports or methods that allow capturing only one stereotype dimension at a time. We address the same topic using a new approach to directly measure mental representations called reverse correlation. This approach presents participants with randomly distorted images and, over several trials, asks participants to select which images are most representative of a social category. The selected images are aggregated to create the average mental representation of the category. We collected a sample of White participants who resided in the United States. Participants were selecting images of a typical Democrat or a typical Republican. A separate sample of participants rated these images. The findings suggest that participants tend to hold an ingroup bias with respect to valence: partisans imagine more positive and feminine mental representations of in-party members and more negative and masculine representations of out-party members. However, perceptions of race/ethnicity seem to be tied to which party participants are imagining: images of Democrats were rated as less representative of White Americans by all participants independently of their own partisanship.

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