BOOK PROJECT
Monitors and Meddlers: How Foreign Actors Influence Local Trust in Elections. Forthcoming. Cambridge University Press. (with Sarah Bush)
This book investigates whether foreign interference helps or harms citizens’ trust in their elections. Trust in elections is a pillar of democracy, yet current research on electoral trust ignores the role foreign actors play in increasing or undermining it. We break new ground by exploring multiple types of foreign influences on elections, including the missions of purportedly-neutral international election observers and the more partisan interventions of Russia and other countries that have recently grabbed headlines. The work delves deep into the psychology of citizens to theorize the conditions under which these interventions promote or undermine trust and democracy. We combine evidence from new and original surveys in three countries: Georgia, Tunisia, and the United States. These countries have all experienced foreign influence around their elections, and the cases will explore how the book’s arguments apply in countries at different levels of democracy.
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
"Refugees to the Rescue: Motivating Pro-Refugee Public Engagement during the COVID-19 Pandemic" Accepted. Journal of Experimental Political Science. (with Claire Adida, Adeline Lo, and Scott Williamson)[email for accepted version]
Migrants are often scapegoated during public health crises. Can such crises create opportunities for migrant inclusion instead? Refugee advocates regularly share narratives of refugee contributions to society, and as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many organizations have stepped up their outreach with stories of refugees helping out in the crisis. We have partnered up with one of the country’s leading refugee advocate organizations to test whether solidarity narratives increase public engagement with refugee advocate organizations We combine a Facebook experimental design with an original survey measuring inclusionary attitudes and behavior toward refugees to evaluate the effectiveness of refugee narratives. We test whether migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19, targeted to local communities, or labeled as refugees vs. immigrants enhance public engagement with the outreach efforts of refuge organizations Our results help us understand which refugee narratives shape public engagement with efforts to support vulnerable minorities during a public health crisis.
"Increasing Immigrant Inclusion: Family History, Empathy, and Immigration in the United States" 2021. American Political Science Review, 115(2): 686-693. (with Scott Williamson, Claire Adida, Adeline Lo, Melina Platas and Seth Werfel)[paper]
Immigration is a highly polarized issue in the United States, and negative attitudes toward immigrants are common. Yet almost all Americans are descended from people who originated outside the United States. Can this common history overcome the intense polarization that migration policy elicits? In this paper, we draw from recent studies showing that perspective-taking decreases prejudice toward outgroups to investigate whether priming Americans on their own immigration history induces more support for immigrants and immigration. We test this hypothesis with three separate survey experiments conducted over the past two years. Our findings show that priming family history—a light-touch intervention—generates small but consistent inclusionary effects on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. These effects are immediate, and occur even among partisan subgroups and Americans who approve of President Trump. Furthermore, we provide evidence that increased empathy for immigrants constitutes the mechanism driving these effects. Our consistent results contribute to growing experimental literatures on prejudice reduction and migration by suggesting an important role for empathy in shifting attitudes toward immigration.
"Foreign Meddling and Mass Attitudes Towards International Economic Engagement" 2020. International Organization, 74(3): 584-609. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
What explains variation in individual preferences for foreign economic engagement? Although a large and growing literature addresses that question, little research examines how partner countries affect public opinion on policies such as trade, foreign aid, and investment. We construct a new theory arguing that political side-taking by outside powers shapes individuals’ support for engaging economically with those countries. We test the theory using original surveys in the United States and Tunisia. In both cases, the potential partner country’s side-taking in the partisan politics of the respondents’ country dramatically shapes support for foreign economic relations. As the rise of new aid donors, investors, and trade partners creates new choices in economic partners, the theory and findings contained in this article are critical to understanding mass preferences about open economic engagement.
"Islam, Gender Segregation, and Political Engagement: Evidence from an experiment in Tunisia" 2020. Political Science Research & Methods, 1-17. (Winner of the APSA Women and Politics Section Best Paper Award 2016, with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Does officeholder gender affect citizens' political engagement? This paper answers that question using evidence from a nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia. It finds that people were significantly more likely to want to contact their representatives when primed to think of women officeholders as compared to a mixed-gender group of officeholders. This pattern did not vary according to the respondent's gender. These findings are surprising in light of the literature, which suggests that people will either be less willing to contact women officeholders in general or that contact will vary by the citizen's gender. Further analyses reveal that the effect is concentrated among supporters of the main Islamist party in Tunisia, who were notably less likely to contact the mixed-gender group. This finding is consistent with the explanation that political Islamists support gender segregation more than secularists and encourages future work examining the implications of the women's political presence in conservative environments.
"Selling International Law Enforcement: Elite Justifications and Public Values" 2020. Research & Politics, 7(3): 1-7. (with Melissa Lee)[paper]
This paper investigates the effectiveness of common elite justifications for marshaling public support for international law enforcement. We study two justifications -- the illegality of a country's actions, and the consequences of those actions for international order -- and argue that their effectiveness depends on two public values: ideology and interpersonal norm enforcement. We test our arguments in the case of international law prohibiting the violent seizure of territory. Using an original survey experiment fielded in the U.S. and Australia, we find that these justifications shape support for enforcement, and that the frames appeal to different segments of the public. These results imply elites can build a broader coalition of support by using multiple justifications. We contribute to the scholarship on international law by showing how the domestic public - - typically considered mechanism for generating compliance within states -- can impede or facilitate third-party enforcement of the law between states.
"Transnational Ties and Support for Foreign Aid." 2020. International Studies Quarterly, 64(1): 133-147. [paper]
Although globalization and international migration have increased personal connections across national borders, we know little about how these connections affect attitudes towards foreign policy. This study examines how transnational ties affect support for foreign aid in donor countries. It argues that transnational ties increase support for foreign aid via two mechanisms: group interests and cosmopolitanism. An original survey experiment embedded in a national survey of 1,000 Latino Americans shows that Latinos vary significantly in the strength of their transnational ties, which is strongly correlated with support for foreign aid. The findings from the experiment, which varies the location of an American foreign aid program, demonstrate that although group interests explain some of this effect, cosmopolitanism is also an important mechanism. Indeed, Latinos with transnational ties equally support aid to Africa and Latin America. A test of the generalizability of the findings to other racial and ethnic groups in the United States and United Kingdom reveal that group interests may be a more powerful mechanism outside of the Latino American community. This study encourages further work on the relationship between transnational ties and foreign policy attitudes and provides insight into the emerging link between international migration and foreign aid.
"Do Electronic Devices in Face-to-Face Interviews Change Survey Behavior? Evidence from a Developing Country." 2019. Research & Politics, 6(2): 1-7. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
A large literature shows that survey mode and survey technologies significantly affect item non- response and response distributions. Yet as researchers increasingly conduct surveys in the developing world, little attention has been devoted to understanding how new technologies—such as the use of electronic devices in face-to-face interviews—produce bias there. We hypothesize that using electronic devices instead of pen and paper can affect survey behavior via two pathways: a wealth effect and a surveillance effect. To test the hypotheses, we use data from a two-wave panel survey fielded in Tunisia. We investigate whether responses collected in Wave 1 with pen and paper changed when some individuals were interviewed in Wave 2 by interviewers using tablet computers. Consistent with the wealth effect hypothesis, more than half of the lowest income respondents reported a higher income in the second wave when interviewers used tablets. Conversely, we find little evidence that concerns about surveillance changed survey behavior.
"Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections." 2018. International Organization, 72(3): 659-692. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Prior research has sought to understand the rise of election observers and their consequences for outcomes such as fraud, protest, and violence. These studies are important, but they miss a significant micro-foundational dynamic that observers themselves care about: the effect that election observers have on local attitudes about elections. How does election observer identity affect the local credibility of elections? We argue that the activities of election observers can enhance the local credibility of elections, but only when locals perceive observers as being both capable of detecting fraud and unbiased in that pursuit. Importantly, not all observer groups are seen as capable and unbiased. Experimental evidence from a large-scale, nationally representative experiment in Tunisia supports the argument. A key finding is that observers from the Arab League---an organization not known internationally for quality election observation---enhanced credibility the most as they were the only group perceived locally as both relatively capable and unbiased.
"Preferences for Domestic Action Over International Transfers in Global Climate Policy" 2018. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 5(2): 73-87. (with Mark Buntaine) [paper]
Cost-effective and equitable climate change mitigation requires the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries. In two behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that American subjects act according to a strong home preference, by making private donations and writing letters in support of public spending more often for mitigation programs located at home versus those overseas. We attempt to overcome the preference to act at home by randomly informing some subjects that foreign programs are more cost-effective than domestic programs. Only in the case of private donations is home preference ever mitigated. From a separate experimental treatment, we show that the preference against foreign programs is exacerbated when the co-benefits of mitigation programs are made salient. Importantly, home preference crosses party lines, indicating that it is a deep-seeded, affective preference. These findings highlight significant political obstacles to international cooperation on climate change that relies on transfers.
"The Promise and Limits of Election Observers in Building Election Credibility." 2017. The Journal of Politics, 79(3): 921-935. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Scholars and practitioners posit that election observers (EOs) affect local beliefs about the credibility of elections. Though these effects have important implications for democratization, they remain unexamined at the individual level. This paper applies models of Bayesian opinion updating and motivated reasoning to illuminate the conditions under which EOs change beliefs about elections. Experimental evidence from a national survey fielded immediately following the first democratic parliamentary election in Tunisia tests the argument. Two important findings emerge. First, exposure to EOs' positive and negative statements produces a small but significant difference in individuals' perceptions of the election on average. Second, EOs' negative statements cause the election's main losing partisans---who may have had weak prior beliefs that the election was credible and were likely receptive to critical information---to believe the election was significantly less credible. These findings establish a baseline for future work on how third-party monitors shape local perceptions of political processes.
"The Effects of Authoritarian Iconography: An Experimental Test." 2016. Comparative Political Studies, 49(13): 1704-1738. (with Sarah Bush, Aaron Erlich, and Yael Zeira) [paper]
This project builds on the rich literature on authoritarian survival asking whether public images of state leaders promote citizens’ compliance with the government? If so, why do they have that effect and among whom? We argue that authoritarian iconography increases compliance with and support for the state via three causal mechanisms: legitimacy, self-interest, and coercion. We will use a laboratory experiment to evaluate the effect of public images of state leaders on citizens’ political compliance and support. The findings promise to inform our understanding of how and why authoritarian leaders maintain power. The findings appear in Comparative Political Studies for their special issue on research transparency. The special issue accepted manuscripts "results-blind".
"Enfranchising Displaced Voters: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina." 2007. Election Law Journal, 6(4): 354–371. (with Erik S. Herron) [paper]
How can the designers and administrators of election rules balance the need to enfranchise voters with the need to ensure the integrity of the vote? This tension is particularly acute when large numbers of voting-age citizens are displaced from their permanent residences due to war, natural disaster, or other conditions. Our article addresses the challenges of enfranchising refugees and internally-displaced persons (IDPs) by assessing statutory and practical experiences of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1996–2006. This article adds to the research on displaced voters by exploring the treatment of refugees and IDPs in election laws, the debate surrounding their inclusion, and by assessing the participation of refugees and IDPs in one country across many elections.
SUBMITTED
"No Man Left Behind? Hostage Deservingness and the Politics of Hostage Recovery" (with Danielle Gilbert)[pdf]
Kidnappings of soldiers, journalists, aid workers, and other civilians by armed groups happen every day. Yet, the politics of hostage recovery remains relatively understudied by international relations scholars. Whether and how governments choose to recover their citizens varies widely, as does public sentiment about bringing hostages home. To explain this variation, we develop a theory of hostage deservingness and detail how perceptions of deservingness affect support for a range of recovery options. We argue that deservingness is determined by the circumstance of capture---particularly whether hostages are perceived to be to blame for their capture. We test the argument using experiments embedded in two large, national surveys of the American public. The results of the experiments demonstrate that public support for hostage recovery depends on the public's perceptions of who’s to blame for the hostage's capture. When hostages are described as not to blame for their capture, support for rescue and ransom payment is at its highest. However, when capture occurs under circumstances that suggest the hostage bears responsibility, support for rescue and ransom payment decreases, especially when recovery is costly. These findings suggest that the public is out of step with U.S. government policy, which dictates circumstance of capture should be ignored, and predicts potential backlash for policymakers in recovering less sympathetic hostages.
"Values at the Water's Edge: Social Welfare Values and Foreign Aid" [pdf]
To explain variation in foreign aid levels and attitudes in donor countries, past research emphasizes the importance of values related to the welfare state such as economic ideology. Scholars argue that liberals support redistribution at home in the form of a strong welfare state and redistribution abroad in the form of foreign aid. Yet, the conditions under which values related to domestic politics translate to issues of foreign policy remain undertheorized. I argue that economic ideology interacts with foreign policy orientation -- individuals' placement along the internationalist/isolationist spectrum -- to shape foreign aid attitudes and outcomes. Using original data from surveys fielded in the U.S., UK, and Norway, as well as data on foreign aid spending levels, I show that the relationship between ideology and foreign aid is conditional on foreign policy orientation. The effect is driven by liberal isolationists whose support for redistribution stops at the water's edge.
WORKING PAPERS
"Fighting Poverty at Home and Abroad: Explaining Redistributive Attitudes and Behaviors" [email for draft]
Why do individuals support redistribution? This paper broadens the scope of the literature on redistribution to include the international context. It investigates whether national borders are barriers to public support for income redistribution, and if so, why. I argue that variation in beliefs about moral obligations to the poor across the domestic and international contexts help explain why individuals may privilege the domestic poor over the foreign poor. I test this theory against competing explanations such as beliefs about government institutions and beliefs about recipients. My study uses survey experiments embedded in several nationally representative surveys of Americans from 2013-2014. By experimentally manipulating the nationality of the recipients of a redistributive program, while keeping other program details constant, I am able to isolate the effect of nationality on redistributive attitudes and behaviors. I find that Americans are significantly less supportive of a program that targets recipients in other countries and less willing to donate to a charity that helps the foreign poor. These effects are largely explained by beliefs about the government’s and individuals’ moral obligations to the poor. This study’s findings suggest that support for redistribution is structured by individual moral values providing further evidence highlighting the importance of non-material sources of redistributive attitudes and behaviors.
"Mechanisms of Racial Paternalism: Mass Media, Intergroup Dynamics, and Public Opinion toward Foreign Aid" (with Andy Baker)
Recent experiments on public opinion in donor countries suggest the presence of racial paternalism in mass attitudes on foreign aid. White citizens in the U.S. and U.K. are more favorable toward aid to black than to white foreigners, a preference that exists because of a tendency to underestimate the economic agency of foreigners of African descent. Left unanswered by these new findings, however, is the question of why this paternalism exists. Is it because Western media tend to portray Africans as helpless victims in need of saving by the U.S. and Europe? Or does it arise more naturally out of ingroup/outgroup dynamics, whereby physical and cultural distance inclines donors to downplay the human capabilities of black potential aid recipients? We propose “the Mauritius experiment,” a design that would randomly vary the racial similarity between Norwegian respondents and hypothetical aid recipients in the African country of Mauritius. Our design will be fielded on the upcoming wave of the Norwegian Citizen Panel.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
"Deliberative Foreign Policy: The Attitudes and Behaviors of the Citizen Elite"
This project examines the role of political knowledge and internationalism on foreign policy attitudes. I am the principal investigator of a long-term panel study in partnership with the Foreign Policy Association. The aim is to carry out bi-annual surveys of participants in the Great Decisions program, the first of which was fielded to around 2,000 participants in 2014. Participants in the Great Decisions program join and organize foreign policy discussion groups across the United States and are highly educated, motivated citizens with a keen interest in foreign policy. Each year, members will contribute their opinions in two separate surveys. The first will be the National Opinion Ballot, which will collect their attitudes on the specific foreign policy topics for that year's discussion sessions. The second will be the National Foreign Policy Attitudes Survey, which will measure their attitudes on timeless foreign policy issues from international conflict to cooperation. The panel study will produce a number of opportunities to understand the effects of education and deliberation on a range of foreign policy attitudes and will enable us to learn how the attitudes of the citizen elite change over time and respond to real-world events.
Monitors and Meddlers: How Foreign Actors Influence Local Trust in Elections. Forthcoming. Cambridge University Press. (with Sarah Bush)
This book investigates whether foreign interference helps or harms citizens’ trust in their elections. Trust in elections is a pillar of democracy, yet current research on electoral trust ignores the role foreign actors play in increasing or undermining it. We break new ground by exploring multiple types of foreign influences on elections, including the missions of purportedly-neutral international election observers and the more partisan interventions of Russia and other countries that have recently grabbed headlines. The work delves deep into the psychology of citizens to theorize the conditions under which these interventions promote or undermine trust and democracy. We combine evidence from new and original surveys in three countries: Georgia, Tunisia, and the United States. These countries have all experienced foreign influence around their elections, and the cases will explore how the book’s arguments apply in countries at different levels of democracy.
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
"Refugees to the Rescue: Motivating Pro-Refugee Public Engagement during the COVID-19 Pandemic" Accepted. Journal of Experimental Political Science. (with Claire Adida, Adeline Lo, and Scott Williamson)[email for accepted version]
Migrants are often scapegoated during public health crises. Can such crises create opportunities for migrant inclusion instead? Refugee advocates regularly share narratives of refugee contributions to society, and as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, many organizations have stepped up their outreach with stories of refugees helping out in the crisis. We have partnered up with one of the country’s leading refugee advocate organizations to test whether solidarity narratives increase public engagement with refugee advocate organizations We combine a Facebook experimental design with an original survey measuring inclusionary attitudes and behavior toward refugees to evaluate the effectiveness of refugee narratives. We test whether migrant narratives framed in the context of COVID-19, targeted to local communities, or labeled as refugees vs. immigrants enhance public engagement with the outreach efforts of refuge organizations Our results help us understand which refugee narratives shape public engagement with efforts to support vulnerable minorities during a public health crisis.
"Increasing Immigrant Inclusion: Family History, Empathy, and Immigration in the United States" 2021. American Political Science Review, 115(2): 686-693. (with Scott Williamson, Claire Adida, Adeline Lo, Melina Platas and Seth Werfel)[paper]
Immigration is a highly polarized issue in the United States, and negative attitudes toward immigrants are common. Yet almost all Americans are descended from people who originated outside the United States. Can this common history overcome the intense polarization that migration policy elicits? In this paper, we draw from recent studies showing that perspective-taking decreases prejudice toward outgroups to investigate whether priming Americans on their own immigration history induces more support for immigrants and immigration. We test this hypothesis with three separate survey experiments conducted over the past two years. Our findings show that priming family history—a light-touch intervention—generates small but consistent inclusionary effects on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. These effects are immediate, and occur even among partisan subgroups and Americans who approve of President Trump. Furthermore, we provide evidence that increased empathy for immigrants constitutes the mechanism driving these effects. Our consistent results contribute to growing experimental literatures on prejudice reduction and migration by suggesting an important role for empathy in shifting attitudes toward immigration.
"Foreign Meddling and Mass Attitudes Towards International Economic Engagement" 2020. International Organization, 74(3): 584-609. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
What explains variation in individual preferences for foreign economic engagement? Although a large and growing literature addresses that question, little research examines how partner countries affect public opinion on policies such as trade, foreign aid, and investment. We construct a new theory arguing that political side-taking by outside powers shapes individuals’ support for engaging economically with those countries. We test the theory using original surveys in the United States and Tunisia. In both cases, the potential partner country’s side-taking in the partisan politics of the respondents’ country dramatically shapes support for foreign economic relations. As the rise of new aid donors, investors, and trade partners creates new choices in economic partners, the theory and findings contained in this article are critical to understanding mass preferences about open economic engagement.
"Islam, Gender Segregation, and Political Engagement: Evidence from an experiment in Tunisia" 2020. Political Science Research & Methods, 1-17. (Winner of the APSA Women and Politics Section Best Paper Award 2016, with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Does officeholder gender affect citizens' political engagement? This paper answers that question using evidence from a nationally-representative experiment in Tunisia. It finds that people were significantly more likely to want to contact their representatives when primed to think of women officeholders as compared to a mixed-gender group of officeholders. This pattern did not vary according to the respondent's gender. These findings are surprising in light of the literature, which suggests that people will either be less willing to contact women officeholders in general or that contact will vary by the citizen's gender. Further analyses reveal that the effect is concentrated among supporters of the main Islamist party in Tunisia, who were notably less likely to contact the mixed-gender group. This finding is consistent with the explanation that political Islamists support gender segregation more than secularists and encourages future work examining the implications of the women's political presence in conservative environments.
"Selling International Law Enforcement: Elite Justifications and Public Values" 2020. Research & Politics, 7(3): 1-7. (with Melissa Lee)[paper]
This paper investigates the effectiveness of common elite justifications for marshaling public support for international law enforcement. We study two justifications -- the illegality of a country's actions, and the consequences of those actions for international order -- and argue that their effectiveness depends on two public values: ideology and interpersonal norm enforcement. We test our arguments in the case of international law prohibiting the violent seizure of territory. Using an original survey experiment fielded in the U.S. and Australia, we find that these justifications shape support for enforcement, and that the frames appeal to different segments of the public. These results imply elites can build a broader coalition of support by using multiple justifications. We contribute to the scholarship on international law by showing how the domestic public - - typically considered mechanism for generating compliance within states -- can impede or facilitate third-party enforcement of the law between states.
"Transnational Ties and Support for Foreign Aid." 2020. International Studies Quarterly, 64(1): 133-147. [paper]
Although globalization and international migration have increased personal connections across national borders, we know little about how these connections affect attitudes towards foreign policy. This study examines how transnational ties affect support for foreign aid in donor countries. It argues that transnational ties increase support for foreign aid via two mechanisms: group interests and cosmopolitanism. An original survey experiment embedded in a national survey of 1,000 Latino Americans shows that Latinos vary significantly in the strength of their transnational ties, which is strongly correlated with support for foreign aid. The findings from the experiment, which varies the location of an American foreign aid program, demonstrate that although group interests explain some of this effect, cosmopolitanism is also an important mechanism. Indeed, Latinos with transnational ties equally support aid to Africa and Latin America. A test of the generalizability of the findings to other racial and ethnic groups in the United States and United Kingdom reveal that group interests may be a more powerful mechanism outside of the Latino American community. This study encourages further work on the relationship between transnational ties and foreign policy attitudes and provides insight into the emerging link between international migration and foreign aid.
"Do Electronic Devices in Face-to-Face Interviews Change Survey Behavior? Evidence from a Developing Country." 2019. Research & Politics, 6(2): 1-7. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
A large literature shows that survey mode and survey technologies significantly affect item non- response and response distributions. Yet as researchers increasingly conduct surveys in the developing world, little attention has been devoted to understanding how new technologies—such as the use of electronic devices in face-to-face interviews—produce bias there. We hypothesize that using electronic devices instead of pen and paper can affect survey behavior via two pathways: a wealth effect and a surveillance effect. To test the hypotheses, we use data from a two-wave panel survey fielded in Tunisia. We investigate whether responses collected in Wave 1 with pen and paper changed when some individuals were interviewed in Wave 2 by interviewers using tablet computers. Consistent with the wealth effect hypothesis, more than half of the lowest income respondents reported a higher income in the second wave when interviewers used tablets. Conversely, we find little evidence that concerns about surveillance changed survey behavior.
"Who's There? Election Observer Identity and the Local Credibility of Elections." 2018. International Organization, 72(3): 659-692. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Prior research has sought to understand the rise of election observers and their consequences for outcomes such as fraud, protest, and violence. These studies are important, but they miss a significant micro-foundational dynamic that observers themselves care about: the effect that election observers have on local attitudes about elections. How does election observer identity affect the local credibility of elections? We argue that the activities of election observers can enhance the local credibility of elections, but only when locals perceive observers as being both capable of detecting fraud and unbiased in that pursuit. Importantly, not all observer groups are seen as capable and unbiased. Experimental evidence from a large-scale, nationally representative experiment in Tunisia supports the argument. A key finding is that observers from the Arab League---an organization not known internationally for quality election observation---enhanced credibility the most as they were the only group perceived locally as both relatively capable and unbiased.
"Preferences for Domestic Action Over International Transfers in Global Climate Policy" 2018. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 5(2): 73-87. (with Mark Buntaine) [paper]
Cost-effective and equitable climate change mitigation requires the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries. In two behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that American subjects act according to a strong home preference, by making private donations and writing letters in support of public spending more often for mitigation programs located at home versus those overseas. We attempt to overcome the preference to act at home by randomly informing some subjects that foreign programs are more cost-effective than domestic programs. Only in the case of private donations is home preference ever mitigated. From a separate experimental treatment, we show that the preference against foreign programs is exacerbated when the co-benefits of mitigation programs are made salient. Importantly, home preference crosses party lines, indicating that it is a deep-seeded, affective preference. These findings highlight significant political obstacles to international cooperation on climate change that relies on transfers.
"The Promise and Limits of Election Observers in Building Election Credibility." 2017. The Journal of Politics, 79(3): 921-935. (with Sarah Bush) [paper]
Scholars and practitioners posit that election observers (EOs) affect local beliefs about the credibility of elections. Though these effects have important implications for democratization, they remain unexamined at the individual level. This paper applies models of Bayesian opinion updating and motivated reasoning to illuminate the conditions under which EOs change beliefs about elections. Experimental evidence from a national survey fielded immediately following the first democratic parliamentary election in Tunisia tests the argument. Two important findings emerge. First, exposure to EOs' positive and negative statements produces a small but significant difference in individuals' perceptions of the election on average. Second, EOs' negative statements cause the election's main losing partisans---who may have had weak prior beliefs that the election was credible and were likely receptive to critical information---to believe the election was significantly less credible. These findings establish a baseline for future work on how third-party monitors shape local perceptions of political processes.
"The Effects of Authoritarian Iconography: An Experimental Test." 2016. Comparative Political Studies, 49(13): 1704-1738. (with Sarah Bush, Aaron Erlich, and Yael Zeira) [paper]
This project builds on the rich literature on authoritarian survival asking whether public images of state leaders promote citizens’ compliance with the government? If so, why do they have that effect and among whom? We argue that authoritarian iconography increases compliance with and support for the state via three causal mechanisms: legitimacy, self-interest, and coercion. We will use a laboratory experiment to evaluate the effect of public images of state leaders on citizens’ political compliance and support. The findings promise to inform our understanding of how and why authoritarian leaders maintain power. The findings appear in Comparative Political Studies for their special issue on research transparency. The special issue accepted manuscripts "results-blind".
"Enfranchising Displaced Voters: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina." 2007. Election Law Journal, 6(4): 354–371. (with Erik S. Herron) [paper]
How can the designers and administrators of election rules balance the need to enfranchise voters with the need to ensure the integrity of the vote? This tension is particularly acute when large numbers of voting-age citizens are displaced from their permanent residences due to war, natural disaster, or other conditions. Our article addresses the challenges of enfranchising refugees and internally-displaced persons (IDPs) by assessing statutory and practical experiences of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1996–2006. This article adds to the research on displaced voters by exploring the treatment of refugees and IDPs in election laws, the debate surrounding their inclusion, and by assessing the participation of refugees and IDPs in one country across many elections.
SUBMITTED
"No Man Left Behind? Hostage Deservingness and the Politics of Hostage Recovery" (with Danielle Gilbert)[pdf]
Kidnappings of soldiers, journalists, aid workers, and other civilians by armed groups happen every day. Yet, the politics of hostage recovery remains relatively understudied by international relations scholars. Whether and how governments choose to recover their citizens varies widely, as does public sentiment about bringing hostages home. To explain this variation, we develop a theory of hostage deservingness and detail how perceptions of deservingness affect support for a range of recovery options. We argue that deservingness is determined by the circumstance of capture---particularly whether hostages are perceived to be to blame for their capture. We test the argument using experiments embedded in two large, national surveys of the American public. The results of the experiments demonstrate that public support for hostage recovery depends on the public's perceptions of who’s to blame for the hostage's capture. When hostages are described as not to blame for their capture, support for rescue and ransom payment is at its highest. However, when capture occurs under circumstances that suggest the hostage bears responsibility, support for rescue and ransom payment decreases, especially when recovery is costly. These findings suggest that the public is out of step with U.S. government policy, which dictates circumstance of capture should be ignored, and predicts potential backlash for policymakers in recovering less sympathetic hostages.
"Values at the Water's Edge: Social Welfare Values and Foreign Aid" [pdf]
To explain variation in foreign aid levels and attitudes in donor countries, past research emphasizes the importance of values related to the welfare state such as economic ideology. Scholars argue that liberals support redistribution at home in the form of a strong welfare state and redistribution abroad in the form of foreign aid. Yet, the conditions under which values related to domestic politics translate to issues of foreign policy remain undertheorized. I argue that economic ideology interacts with foreign policy orientation -- individuals' placement along the internationalist/isolationist spectrum -- to shape foreign aid attitudes and outcomes. Using original data from surveys fielded in the U.S., UK, and Norway, as well as data on foreign aid spending levels, I show that the relationship between ideology and foreign aid is conditional on foreign policy orientation. The effect is driven by liberal isolationists whose support for redistribution stops at the water's edge.
WORKING PAPERS
"Fighting Poverty at Home and Abroad: Explaining Redistributive Attitudes and Behaviors" [email for draft]
Why do individuals support redistribution? This paper broadens the scope of the literature on redistribution to include the international context. It investigates whether national borders are barriers to public support for income redistribution, and if so, why. I argue that variation in beliefs about moral obligations to the poor across the domestic and international contexts help explain why individuals may privilege the domestic poor over the foreign poor. I test this theory against competing explanations such as beliefs about government institutions and beliefs about recipients. My study uses survey experiments embedded in several nationally representative surveys of Americans from 2013-2014. By experimentally manipulating the nationality of the recipients of a redistributive program, while keeping other program details constant, I am able to isolate the effect of nationality on redistributive attitudes and behaviors. I find that Americans are significantly less supportive of a program that targets recipients in other countries and less willing to donate to a charity that helps the foreign poor. These effects are largely explained by beliefs about the government’s and individuals’ moral obligations to the poor. This study’s findings suggest that support for redistribution is structured by individual moral values providing further evidence highlighting the importance of non-material sources of redistributive attitudes and behaviors.
"Mechanisms of Racial Paternalism: Mass Media, Intergroup Dynamics, and Public Opinion toward Foreign Aid" (with Andy Baker)
Recent experiments on public opinion in donor countries suggest the presence of racial paternalism in mass attitudes on foreign aid. White citizens in the U.S. and U.K. are more favorable toward aid to black than to white foreigners, a preference that exists because of a tendency to underestimate the economic agency of foreigners of African descent. Left unanswered by these new findings, however, is the question of why this paternalism exists. Is it because Western media tend to portray Africans as helpless victims in need of saving by the U.S. and Europe? Or does it arise more naturally out of ingroup/outgroup dynamics, whereby physical and cultural distance inclines donors to downplay the human capabilities of black potential aid recipients? We propose “the Mauritius experiment,” a design that would randomly vary the racial similarity between Norwegian respondents and hypothetical aid recipients in the African country of Mauritius. Our design will be fielded on the upcoming wave of the Norwegian Citizen Panel.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
"Deliberative Foreign Policy: The Attitudes and Behaviors of the Citizen Elite"
This project examines the role of political knowledge and internationalism on foreign policy attitudes. I am the principal investigator of a long-term panel study in partnership with the Foreign Policy Association. The aim is to carry out bi-annual surveys of participants in the Great Decisions program, the first of which was fielded to around 2,000 participants in 2014. Participants in the Great Decisions program join and organize foreign policy discussion groups across the United States and are highly educated, motivated citizens with a keen interest in foreign policy. Each year, members will contribute their opinions in two separate surveys. The first will be the National Opinion Ballot, which will collect their attitudes on the specific foreign policy topics for that year's discussion sessions. The second will be the National Foreign Policy Attitudes Survey, which will measure their attitudes on timeless foreign policy issues from international conflict to cooperation. The panel study will produce a number of opportunities to understand the effects of education and deliberation on a range of foreign policy attitudes and will enable us to learn how the attitudes of the citizen elite change over time and respond to real-world events.
