Garth Taylor Dissertation Fellowship in Public Opinion

By Hwayong Shin

Project Description

My research seeks to clarify conditions under which Democrats and Republicans can converge on trusted news sources. By doing so, I aim to address the deep-seated and troubling social problem of a partisan divide over basic facts. I focus on how political fact-checking, a genre of reporting dedicated to assessing the accuracy of political claims, does or does not earn bipartisan trust. By examining the stated missions of fact-checking sources and conducting surveys on public perceptions of these sources, I find the gap between the ideals of fact-checking and its performance. To improve fact-checking’s ability to bring partisans together, I experimentally test how fact-checkers’ decisions about which political parties or issues to cover (e.g., asymmetric coverage of political parties, politics-centered coverage) affect partisan reactions. My work will inform the work of journalists, educators, and policymakers in their efforts to create evidence-based news sources in ways that reduce polarization, help citizens make informed choices, and advance democratic accountability.

By Guadalupe (Lupita) Madrigal

Project Description

The DREAM Act, increase in unaccompanied minors, and Trump’s family separation policy demonstrate that this political moment is marked by children at the forefront of the public conversation about immigration. Yet the ways in which children can shape news information remains under-studied and overlooked in the literature. Thus, I ask these questions: To what extent is the news that includes representations of immigrant children and youth substantively different from overall immigration news in the last few decades? What are the consequences of these representations on political attitudes, emotions, and behaviors? Studying the representations of children in immigration news stories, and the subsequent consequences of those representations, matter because the lives of immigrant children are impacted by these broader political conversations and policies. Put simply, understanding the role that childhood and youth play in news stories is a crucial component of understanding overall attitudes about immigration in the United States.

By Princess Williams

Project Description

This project argues that sub-national identification is an influential but omitted factor that influences the formation of American’s political beliefs. For example, using residency in the South as a rough proxy to capture the psychological effects of being socialized in the region, political science routinely finds that Southern Whites residents are distinct from their non-southern counterparts. The extant literature, however, faces important measurement and theoretical limitations. Williams proposes a dynamic measurement of Southern identity to properly investigate this phenomenon and address current limitations. 

This project demonstrates that Southern identity is a widely recognized identity that is both socially and politically significant for Black Americans, as it is for Whites. Investigating Southern identity amongst Black Americans leads to a better understanding of heterogeneity in American political behavior across race. This work also has implications for racial groups beyond Blacks and White Americans, though it focuses on these racial groups as the first stage. 

By Erin Cikanek

Project Description

By examining the variation in emotional cues in news, Cikanek’s dissertation will be one of the first to map the emotional landscape of the news environment that citizens experience during campaigns. This work will address measurement deficiencies in the literature, survey the emotional landscape of the media environment, and examine how emotional signals in the media environment relate to public opinion regarding political behavior, attitudes, and candidate preferences. These studies taken together will help to more fully explain the role emotions play in American elections. Broadly, the ability to measure emotion in a way that more fully integrates psychological theory with measurement design and validation will result in a measurement tool that can be used in other areas of political science to examine the emotional environment surrounding political events,  allowing her to contribute to sub-fields beyond American politics. 

By Mark Tessler and Jane Kitaevich

Project Description

What explains the perpetuation (or even reinforcement) of authoritarian values in societies experiencing significant political transitions? Why does the espousal of democratic values and the construction of new democratic institutions by the state often not promote the emergence of a democratic political culture among ordinary citizens; and what factors at both the state and individual levels of analysis increase the likelihood that a population experiencing a democratic transition will in fact embrace democratic norms?

Using data from a unique dataset, an original survey from Armenia– a state undergoing a prominent democratic transition, and results from a field experiment in the Caucasus, Jane Kitaevich’s research offers an answer this puzzle. Funding from the Garth Taylor Fellowship in Public Opinion will enable her to launch an original household survey in Armenia, which has undergone a major political transition in 2018 by electing its government fairly for the first time in 27 years, following a wave of massive nationwide protests that lasted over 1 month. In addition, Kitaevich will further complement the with a randomized control trial of civics and history teachers’ involvement in the development of a new social science curriculum for public schools in the Republic of Georgia.

By Nicholas Valentino and Kirill Zhirkov

By Don Kinder, Vince Hutchings, and Jennifer Chudy

By Vince Hutchings and Hakeem Jefferson

Project Description

My dissertation explores the conditions under which individuals are likely to abandon pro-group tendencies. More precisely, it attempts to provide a greater understanding of why significant segments of the Black community readily support punitive crime policies that disparately impact people of color and why others oppose redistributive policies perceived to benefit the most economically disadvantaged among them. Bridging literatures from political science and social psychology, I argue that solidarity among marginalized group members is threatened when those who are perceived to benefit or are targeted by a policy or a political action pose a threat to the social image of the group. These more stigmatized group members, I argue, are punished by some within the group for violating social norms and confirming negative stereotypes that threaten the image of the group and, by extension, the self-concept of individual group members. The claim I make in the dissertation is a provocative one. It expects that—in at least some cases—those most in need of group solidarity will be the least likely to receive it. Moreover, under some conditions, the most vulnerable members of these stigmatized groups can expect to face the harsh judgment of both outgroup members and in-group members who desire only that others recognize that not all group members are created equally. Given the group-centric nature of our politics and the important role of solidarity in the face of de jure and de facto inequality, the implications of this theory are numerous and wide-ranging.

By Arthur Lupia and Logan Casey

Project Description

Uganda, a country of 38 million people in East Africa with a history of brutal dictatorship and civil wars, has made great strides in recent years in adopting multi-party elections and in meeting the Millennium Development Goals: it has halved the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, increased the share of births attended by skilled healthcare workers, reduced the under- ve mortality rate, and increased access to clean water and sanitation facilities. This progress depends upon the government’s distribution of limited development resources to particular locations and constituencies. Although political science has several established theories of distributive politics, these are more appropriate for more democratic electoral settings with real competition between political parties in continuous ideological space. It is not yet well understood how governments make these allocation decisions in ethnically diverse, partial democracies in the developing world like Uganda, where the incumbent strongman may use intimidation as a substitute for winning voters’ support and voters’ preference for co-ethnic candidates or parties identi ed with their own ethnic group might undermine performance-based voting.

This project investigates how the geography of political support aects partially-democratic governments’ allocation of development goods and their impact on social welfare, and following the upcoming elections in 2016, how voters in turn respond to the distribution of these goods.

By Ted Brader and Kristyn L. Karl

Project Description

When it comes to politics, large segments of the population are “tuned out”. Yet we have little insight into the ways in which these segments may be systematically determined by individual characteristics and unconscious mechanisms. This research provides a theoretical and empirical basis for directly incorporating the role of attention into research on political behavior. While it is virtually inevitable that many individuals are frequently exposed to campaign advertisements that occur in the background while completing their daily tasks, exposure and attention must be considered separately. I argue that the influence of political advertisements may be far less wide reaching than anticipated, as most citizens are not only consciously, but also unconsciously tuned out. By examining unconscious physiological responses to political ads, in addition to selfreported emotional responses and recall measures, the current project addresses the degree to which everyday appeals are likely to reach the general public. Ultimately, the findings speak to the way in which particular political behaviors and modes of citizenship are unlikely to be uniformly distributed across the population, calling into question whether all citizens are equally suited to and likely to engage in the normative ideals of democratic citizenship.