Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy Archive 2024-2025
About the workshops
Interdisciplinary Workshops on Politics and Policy are weekly seminars hosted by the Center for Political Studies. Speakers present current research on a wide range of topics. Abstracts of past workshops are available in the menu to the right.
Past Events
When Hard Work Isn’t Enough: Race, Inequality and the Politics of Achieving the American Dream
Sept. 11, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Zoe Walker, University of Michigan
Abstract
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.
Democracy Dismissed: When Leaders and Citizens Choose Election Violence
Sept. 18, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Megan Turnbull, University of Georgia
Abstract
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.
Creative Construction: The Rise and Stall of Infrastructure in Latin America
Sept. 25, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Alisha Holland, Harvard University
Abstract
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.
Religion is a Racial Appeal (and Vice Versa)
Oct. 2, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Shayla Olson, University of Michigan
Abstract
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.
Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability in the American Electorate
Oct. 16, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST *Room 6050
David Broockman, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
(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.
Prospective Threats and Retrospective Views
Oct. 23, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Alexander Sahn, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Abstract
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.
Unseen Politics: Hidden Impact of Entertainment Media in America
Oct. 30, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Eunji Kim (Columbia University)
Abstract
The Patriarchy in the Parties: Voter bias vs. party support of women in elections in Indonesia.
Nov. 6, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Jóhanna Birnir, University of Maryland
Abstract
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.
Good Citizenship and Native-Immigrant Conflict: Experimental Evidence from Europe
Nov. 13, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Nicholas Sambanis, Yale University
Abstract
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.
Patrolling the Polls: The Effect of Partisan Observers on Election Outcomes
Nov. 20, 2024 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Mollie Cohen, Purdue University
Abstract
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.
How Does Partisan Gerrymandering Affect Voter Participation? Evidence from a Randomized Redistricting Lottery in North Carolina
Jan. 15, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Jowei Chen, University of Michigan
Abstract
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.
The Spectral Defect: Death, Diagnosis, and Determinism Across the Atlantic World
Feb. 5, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Pyar Seth, University of Notre Dame
Abstract
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.”
Community Policing, Security, and Citizen-State Relations: Evidence from Experiments in the Philippines
Feb. 12, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Matthew Nanes, Saint Louis University
Abstract
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.
Seeing like a Citizen: Experimental Evidence on How Empowerment Affects Engagement with the State
Feb. 26, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Cyrus Samii, New York University
(Joint work with Soeren Henn, Laura Paler, Wilson Prichard, and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra)
Abstract
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.
Emotions as information in the face of disaster
Mar. 12, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Talbot Andrew, Cornell University
Abstract
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.
Mental Images of the U.S. Parties and Political Polarization: A Reverse Correlation Analysis
Mar. 19, 2025 | Noon to 1:00 PM EST
Kirill Zhirkov, University of Virginia
Work with Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi and Jeremy Cone
Abstract
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.