Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy

Despite long-standing racial disparities in wealth, housing, and education, many Black Americans still believe in the American Dream. What are the political consequences of believing America provides fair opportunities for economic mobility under conditions of ongoing racial inequality? In this paper, I propose the American Dream narrative undermines Blacks’ awareness of racial barriers in society and, in turn, weakens support for policies to reduce inequality. To test my claims, I introduce a novel measure of Attitudes about the American Dream (AAD) to assess how much an individual believes the American opportunity structure is open to people who work hard. I then combine analyses of qualitative and quantitative data from three original surveys of Black American adults. Across two observational studies, I find the American Dream narrative is associated with increased support for stereotypes about Black Americans as a group, increased opposition to spending on social welfare programs, and diminished support for government intervention to reduce racial disparities. In a third study, I analyze over 1,000 open-ended responses to the AAD measure. Using a structural topic model, I find Blacks who score high on the AAD are significantly less likely to discuss racism when describing the American opportunity structure. I conclude by discussing how this study of Black public opinion provides compelling evidence of the linkage between economic beliefs, explicit racial attitudes and racially conservative policy preferences among disadvantaged groups.

In democratic settings, election violence is often jointly produced: it relies on elite incentives and abilities to deploy violence, but equally, on the willingness of ordinary actors to participate. Yet many studies of election violence overlook this elite-citizen interaction, effectively black boxing the conditions and processes through which elites mobilize people to fight. This article introduces and advances the concept of the joint production of election violence. A theory of joint production considers the process through which elites and ordinary citizens come together to produce violence, asking how, when, and for whom election-related violence becomes thinkable and feasible. The concept also complicates the assumption that supporters are ready and willing to use violence, and instead, specifies how elites coordinate with ordinary actors, including the narratives and appeals that are used to legitimize violence, as well as the social infrastructure that makes violence feasible. Using Nigeria and the U.S. as illustrative case studies, this article provides an analytic framework that can help facilitate more systematic and comparative analyses of elite-citizen interactions in the context of electoral violence, while also bringing theories of election violence into conversation with studies of democratic erosion and right-wing extremism.

Infrastructure is at the heart of contemporary development strategies.  Yet short time horizons are thought to impede infrastructure provision in democracies.  Why do elected politicians invest in infrastructure projects that will not be completed during their time in office?  The answer depends on understanding what infrastructure is and does in politics.  I argue that the political rewards from infrastructure projects come from the associated contracts.  Like many goods and services, infrastructure investments are neither fully privatized, in the sense of transferring ownership to the private sector, nor fully public, in that the state directly builds projects.  Governments instead contract out to the private sector.  Politicians use their discretion in the contracting process to secure campaign donations, as well as personal rents.  They also manipulate contracts—and particularly the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs)— to hide project costs, shift liabilities to future administrations, and move project decisions away from legislatures.  Detailed evidence from 1,000 large infrastructure contracts, judicial investigations and leaked financial documents, and qualitative interviews with politicians and bureaucrats in Latin America demonstrate why politicians invest in infrastructure and why projects often fail to produce the economic development and social welfare gains promised.  

This study explores the interconnected roles of racial attitudes and religious identity in American politics. Building on existing literature on racial priming, I argue that historical and sociological connections between race and religion create a dynamic where, for white Christians in particular, religious identity shapes responses to racial appeals, and racial attitudes influence reactions to religious cues. Through two survey experiments, I examine responses to racial and religious appeals among Black, Latino, and white Christians, as well as white non-Christians. The findings reveal that white Christians’ religious attachments can be activated by racial appeals, and that whites’ racial attitudes can be triggered by religious messaging. This suggests that the boundaries between racial and religious identities are fluid, with each capable of priming the other in political contexts. These findings imply that political elites may strategically use religious language to covertly evoke racial attitudes, thereby influencing political preferences in ways that have been underestimated in previous research. Moreover, racial appeals may have a more profound effect than previously realized, as they may also activate religious group attachments.

Abstract TBA

(David Broockman and Benjamin Lauderdale): Scholars have debated to what extent Americans’ views on issues are stable, moderate, and ideological. These questions are crucial for understanding polarization and representation, such as to what extent swing voters hold centrist views on issues or are instead cross-pressured across issues; and to what extent the public supports extreme policies. We illustrate why these questions are linked and the need to address them simultaneously. To address these questions, we present a statistical model which estimates the share of individuals’ expressed views which can be explained by ideology, idiosyncrasy, and instability. In pilot data, we find that these explain roughly similar shares of the variation in Americans’ expressed views, but that these shares vary meaningfully across people. We find that ideology is tightly linked to political knowledge, while idiosyncrasy – not instability – is most linked with expressing extreme views. Finally, we find that few voters who prior work characterizes as moderate have centrist views across most issues, but that they are rather largely cross-pressured, agreeing with each party—and sometimes being more extreme than either party—on different issues.

Public participation in local policy making is dominated by a small group of residents who are unrepresentative of the larger population. Why do politicians grease this squeaky wheel? One possibility is that commenters who remember policy decisions that went against their preferences may vote against incumbent politicians and mobilize others to do so as well. This work investigates this possibility by recontacting commenters at public meetings. Currently in the field, this abstract will be updated when results are available.

In this paper, Eugenia Quintanilla argues that political behavior among the public is driven by prosocial political preferences–defined as a desire for political actions, norms, and systems that help others in need. After developing a novel six-item measurement scale for prosocial political preferences, she uses data from four national surveys to test its validity and predictive value. The prosocial political preferences measure is internally valid and distinct from existing similar measures, such as group empathy, humanitarianism and egalitarianism, and generalized beliefs about helping. It is evenly distributed among men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and ethnoracial groups. As hypothesized, Quintanilla finds a strong positive association between prosocial political preferences and greater willingness to participate in politics. The measure not only positively predicts willingness to participate politically, but outpaces other common predictors of political participation, such as age, educational attainment, and partisan identity strength. In two separate surveys, she also finds evidence of prosocial political preferences boosting participation intentions among Latine and Black respondents at greater rates than White respondents.

Do voter patriarchal and religious preferences differentially condition support for female and male candidates in elections characterized by kinship and money politics? This paper juxtaposes theories of party support, as influenced by gender quota, and voter patriarchal and religious preferences, in the context of gendered resource inequity, to examine the effect on the election of women. Using new data on nearly 10K candidates running for the Indonesian legislative election in 2024, our analysis shows that while voter penalties and resource inequities are undoubtedly important, parties can effectively counteract these with strong list placement of female candidates. Our results also highlight the importance for women’s representation, of the interaction between party system fragmentation and list position as conditioned by candidate quotas, and the pivotal influences on representation of seemingly minor adjustments to quota calculations.

Value conflict is at the heart of opposition to multiculturalism in Europe. Yet previous studies have not established which type of value conflict generates more anti-immigrant bias. We present a simple, cost-effective, and easily scalable experimental design to test how anti-immigrant bias responds to perceptions of value conflict generated by violations of welfare state norms and gender equity norms. Both types of norms are central to public debates about immigration in Europe. We collect new data from three European countries on natives’ beliefs regarding immigrants as likely violators of these norms, and we measure the salience of these norms in native society. We find that natives do not always sanction immigrants more for norm violations and their reactions to norm adherence or violations are consistent with a logic of “updating” for high salience norms in countries where norm adherence is itself a norm.

​Partisan poll watchers observe as votes are cast and tallied, theoretically safeguarding the integrity of election results. Yet, voters often suspect that poll watchers manipulate elections. To what degree, and under what circumstances, does the presence of partisan poll watchers improve parties’ electoral performance? I use the as-if random assignment of voters to ballot boxes in Peruvian elections, and the resulting as-if random assignment of poll watchers to ballot boxes, to answer these questions. The presence of a party’s poll watcher improves its electoral performance by between 1.8 and 5.9 percentage points, depending on model specification. However, partisan poll watchers have no effect on invalid votes or turnout. Watchers’ effect on election results is larger where elections are expected to be more competitive. These results suggest that, even where poll watchers do not engage in blatant fraud, their presence influences outcomes.