WORKING PROJECTS

(Newer) Projects in Progress

“How Social Media Creators Shape Mass Politics' (with John Marshall and Kirill Chmel)

  • a five-month-long online field experiment in partnership with the Better Internet Initiative

  • randomizing exposure to political and apolitical social media creators on Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube during the 2024 election season

“America Above Fahrenheit 451: Political Geography of Banned Books'' (with Jane Esberg)

  • extensive data collection efforts to better understand the logic of book censorship in America

“The Political Consequences of New and Non-Traditional Media” (with Kevin Munger)

  • Invited submission for Annual Review of Political Science“

Working Papers

”Unexpected Voices: How Cultural Agents Reshape Political Communication” with Erin York

Digital media has reshaped how citizens encounter political information, often incidentally while engaging in non-political activities. Existing research highlights content drift, where algorithms or social networks push political content into apolitical spaces. We theorize and document a different pathway—actor drift—where cultural figures previously seen as apolitical embed political messages into their routine content. Analyzing millions of Instagram posts and comments from chef-influencers before and after the October 7, 2023 Israel–Hamas war, we show that chefs with ethnic ties to the conflict integrated political commentary into culinary posts, creating hybrid content that drew substantially higher engagement. Yet these interventions led to substantial disengagement from previously loyal followers. These dynamics reveal a central trade-off of the platform era: cultural elites can amplify political messages through trusted parasocial ties, but at the risk of fracturing their audiences. Our study recasts theories of opinion leadership by showing that cultural authority is a consequential and contested channel of political communication.

”Copaganda: The Cultural Foundations of Police Trust” (Under Review) with Tyler Reny and Esteban Fernandez

Despite widespread evidence and news coverage of police misconduct, public trust in American law enforcement remains remarkably stable. This persistence challenges foundational assumptions about institutional legitimacy—that trust derives primarily from real-world performance and lived experience. We argue that entertainment media offers an alternative basis for institutional trust through repeated exposure to heroic police narratives that can reframe contradictory realities. Using text analysis of television scripts, we document consistent pro-police narratives across top-rated “cop drama” programming. Four national surveys reveal robust associations between media exposure and favorable policing attitudes. Two experiments show that entertainment media cultivates trust in police across racial groups and experiential divides, including among those whose direct encounters contradict media portrayals. Effects are strongest among viewers who voluntarily choose such content, creating reinforcing spirals. In a democracy increasingly shaped by mediated narratives, trust may flow not to the most accountable institutions, but to those most effectively mythologized.

“Before the Effect: Assessing Exposure to Partisan Media” (Under Review) with Taylor Carlson

Partisan media exerts a powerful influence on American politics. But experimental evidence often focuses on the counterfactuals, leading to a paradox: while we know much about potential media effects under forced exposure, the actual extent and nature of real-world exposure remain largely unknown. We focus on the most popular partisan news source, Fox News, and ambitiously assemble all available data on direct exposure (TV, web traffic, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) over one month. We find that American exposure to Fox News is more limited than widely believed. Most online content from Fox News content online generates minimal engagement. But among a small subset of avid news consumers, multi-mode exposure is the norm. These findings underscore the limitations in single-mode media studies and the challenges of assessing indirect exposure. They also highlight the vital necessity of grounding scientific inquiries in a more realistic understanding of news media consumption.

“Broken Beacon? How Political Turmoil in the U.S Undermines Public Perception of Democracy in China” wiith Hanying Wei and Junyan Jiang (Dormant)

As one of the world's oldest and largest democracies, the United States has long been considered a global beacon of democratic governance. This article studies how political turmoil in America can undermine public perception of democracy beyond its borders. We compiled a list of a decade's worth of major political events in the U.S from the New York Times and matched their timing with extensive text data from social media discussions of democracy in China. Though China’s educated class has long revered America’s democratic principles, we demonstrate that major U.S. domestic turmoils---ranging from the Capitol attack to the murder of George Floyd---have significantly worsened the Chinese perception of democracy as an institutional ideal. We show that this is not a result of mediated exposure to American politics through Chinese news media but rather a direct and critical reflection of the scenes of democratic unrest. Our findings highlight that in a media environment without national boundaries, political turbulence in the West can have wide-ranging repercussions on international faith in democracy's promises.