Political Communication
“Placebo-Augmented PICA (PICA-2) Design: Assessing the Influence of Foreign Propaganda” Conditonally Accepted at Journal of Politics (with Naoki Egami, Donald Green, and Dan Mattingly)
Experimental studies of media effects have largely relied on “forced exposure'' designs in which subjects are assigned to view messages chosen by the researcher. The Preference-Incorporating Choice and Assignment design (PICA) has attracted a great deal of scholarly interest because it includes both a “forced exposure’’ arm and a “free choice'' arm, in which some subjects select media from a menu of options. We propose an important addition to the basic PICA design that greatly improves the precision with which effects are estimated among subgroups with different viewing preferences. Placebo tests made possible by this design help detect violations of core assumptions. We illustrate the advantages of our placebo-control approach using an original survey experiment conducted in five African countries that gauges the persuasive effects of Chinese and American propaganda. We find propaganda effects are especially large for subjects who prefer not to watch such messages.
“The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media.” 2024. American Political Science Review (with Shawn Patterson Jr)
American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump's unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data---content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers---we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of non-conventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.
”Othering in Everyday Life: Anti-Chinese Bias in the COVID-19 Pandemic.” 2023. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Cindy Kam)
Societal upheavals often ignite bias against “the other.'' While media accounts of xenophobic violence against Asian Americans abound, little systematic evidence exists that identifies the prevalence and scope of anti-Asian bias during COVID-19 pandemic. We examine whether and the extent to which traces of such othering systematically emerge in Americans’ everyday behaviors. Specifically, we analyze a novel dataset focused on Yelp reviews for all restaurants in eight large metropolitan areas. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we find that Chinese restaurants received significantly lower ratings compared with American restaurants shortly after the start of the pandemic. The effect is localized to Chinese restaurants, rather than to all Asian restaurants. Our results highlight the emergence of anti-Chinese prejudice in an ostensibly apolitical setting.
— Winner of The Asian Pacific Americans and Politics Best Paper Award, Western Political Science Association (2023)
“All the President’s Lies: The Impact of Repeated False Claims on Public Opinion.” 2023. Public Opinion Quarterly (with Raunak Pillai and Lisa Fazio)
A hallmark of the Trump presidency was a stream of false statements, many of which were repeated dozens or even hundreds of times. But whether and the extent to which repeated falsehoods translate into public misperceptions remains an open question. We address this by leveraging the most comprehensive data on Trump's misleading claims during his presidency. We find a clear partisan asymmetry. An increase in the number of repetitions of each falsehood corresponded with increased belief among Republicans, but decreased belief among Democrats. We also find an important role of people's media consumption. Whether repetitions correlated with misperceptions was critically dependent on the extent to which people regularly consume right-leaning cable news and falsehoods are repeated on Twitter. We discuss implications of these findings for misinformation research.
“Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility” 2023. American Journal of Poliitical Science
Americans have long believed in upward mobility and the narrative of the American Dream. Even in the face of rising income inequality and substantial empirical evidence that economic mobility has declined in recent decades, many Americans remain convinced of the prospects for upward mobility. What explains this disconnect? I argue that Americans’ media diets play an important role in explaining this puzzle. Specifically, contemporary Americans are watching a record number of entertainment TV programs that emphasize “rags-to-riches” narratives. I demonstrate that such shows have become a ubiquitous part of the media landscape over the last two decades. National surveys as well as online and lab-in-the-field experiments show that exposure to these programs increases viewers’ beliefs in the American Dream and promotes internal attributions of wealth. Media exemplars present in what Americans are watching instead of news can powerfully distort economic perceptions and have important implications for public preferences for redistribution.
— Winner of Walter Lippmann Best Article of the Year Award (APSA 2024), AJPS Best Article Award (MPSA 2024), Best Dissertation Award in Political Psychology (APSA 2020), Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award (APSA 2020), Wilson Carey McWilliams Best Paper Award (APSA 2020), Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Paper Award (ISPP 2020), Top Graduate Student Paper Award in Political Communication (ICA 2019), 2018 GAPSA-Provost Fellowship Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation ($6,000)— Featured in Philadelphia Inquirer
”Measuring Dynamic Media Bias.” 2022. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (with Yphtach Lelkes and Josh McCrain)
Ideological media bias is increasingly central to the study of politics. Yet, past literature often assumes that the ideological bias of any outlet, at least in the short term, is static and exogenous to the political process. We challenge this assumption. We use longitudinal data from the Stanford Cable News Analyzer (2010-2021), which reports the screen time of various political actors on cable news, and quantify the partisan leaning of those actors using their past campaign donation behavior. Using one instantiation of media bias---the mean ideology of political actors on a channel, i.e., visibility bias---we examine weekly, within-day, as well as program-level estimates of media bias. We find that media bias is highly dynamic even in a short term, and that the heightened polarization between TV channels over time was mostly driven by the prime-time shows.
“Temporal Selective Exposure: How Partisans Choose When to Follow Politics” 2021. Political Behavior (with Jin Woo Kim)
It is widely theorized that a high-choice media environment contributes to polarization, yet behavioral evidence of partisan selective exposure in the real world is surprisingly tenuous.Why do partisans have polarized perceptions even though they have relatively balanced media diets? We argue that partisans vary in terms of when they pay attention to the news, not just in terms of the ideological media sources they follow. By leveraging national election surveys across seven decades, as well as the discontinuity in the economic news environment that was induced by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we show that partisans vary their political attentiveness and media consumption in response to whether news events are congenial to their party. Using panel data and a simulation model, we shed light on the importance of this finding by demonstrating how temporal variation in attention to the news media can lead to partisan polarization even if partisans have the same media diets.
— Presented at APSA 2017, ICA 2018
— Top Paper Award from International Communication Association's Political Communication Division
“The Effect of Big-City News on Rural America During the COVID-19 Pandemic” 2020. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (with Michael E. Shepherd and Joshua D. Clinton)
Can “urban-centric” local television news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic affect the behavior of rural residents with lived experiences so different from their ``local" news coverage? Leveraging quasi-random geographic variation in media markets for 771 matched rural counties, we show that rural residents are more likely to practice social distancing if they live in a media market that is more impacted by COVID-19. Individual-level survey responses from residents of these counties confirm county-level behavioral differences and help attribute the differences we identify to differences in local television news coverage---self-reported differences only exist among respondents who prefer watching local news and there are no differences in media usage or consumption across media markets. Although important for showing the ability of local television news to affect behavior despite urban-rural differences, the media-related effects we identify are at most half the size of the differences related to partisan differences
“Identifying the Effect of Political Rumor Diffusion Using Variations in Survey Timing ” 2019. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 14(3): 293-311. (with Jin Woo Kim)
Despite growing concerns about the diffusion of political rumors, researchers often lack the means to estimate their effects. Field experiments seem infeasible due to ethical issues. Survey experiments typically invoke strong assumptions about homogeneous treatment effects across subjects and settings. We argue that exploiting temporal overlap between rumor circulations and survey interviews can be a useful alternative. We focus on an accidental and sudden spread of “Obama-is-a-Muslim” myths in September 2008. Using a difference-in-difference strategy that compares over-time belief changes of those interviewed for the September wave of the 2008-2009 American National Election Studies surveys before the rumor circulation and afterwards, we find that this event increased people’s belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim by 4 to 8 percentage points. To rule out various alternative explanations, we show that the treatment and control groups changed in parallel across waves in terms of an extensive set of placebo variables including political knowledge, other political misperception, and general attitudes toward Obama.
“Does Newspaper Coverage Influence or Reflect Public Perceptions of the Economy?” 2017. Research & Politics 5(1):78–93. (with Daniel J. Hopkins and Soo Jong Kim)
Citizens’ economic perceptions can shape their political and economic behavior, making the origins of those perceptions an important question. Research commonly posits that media coverage is a central source. Here, we test that prospect while considering the alternative hypothesis that media coverage instead echoes public perceptions. This paper applies a straightforward automated measure of the tone of economic coverage to 490,039 articles from 24 national and local media outlets over more than three decades. By matching the 245,947 survey respondents in the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior to measures of contemporaneous media coverage, we can assess the sequencing of changes in media coverage and public perceptions. Together, these data illustrate that newspaper coverage does not systematically precede public perceptions of the economy, a finding which analyses of television transcripts reinforce. Neither national nor local newspapers appear to strongly influence economic perceptions.
Economic Perceptions
“The Racialization of International Trade” 2020. Political Psychology (with Diana C. Mutz and Edward Mansfield)
Despite their less vulnerable economic status, white Americans’ attitudes toward overseas trade have become more protectionist than those of economically disadvantaged minorities. We hypothesize that this pattern is due to four well-documented differences in the psychological attitudes of whites and low-status minorities in the US. These include lower levels of racial prejudice, social dominance, and nationalism among minorities, as well as rising ingroup racial consciousness among whites. Each of these characteristics has been independently linked to trade support in a direction encouraging greater support for trade among low-status minorities. We examine the extent to which attitudes toward trade have become “racialized.” First, we examine the extent to which a person’s racial identity is associated with levels of trade support. Second, we examine whether the predominant race and ethnicity of a potential trading partner country influences Americans’ willingness to trade with that country. Using various surveys and multiple experiments conducted over the past twelve years, we find that white Americans are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries. As the United States grows ever closer to becoming a “majority minority” nation, the racialization of trade attitudes may stimulate shifts in the likely future of America’s trade relationships.
— Featured in Chicago Council on Global Affairs
“The Impact of In-group Favoritism on Trade Preferences” 2017. International Organizations 71(4): 827-850. (with Diana C. Mutz)
Using a population-based survey experiment, this study evaluates the role of in-group favoritism in influencing American attitudes toward international trade. By systematically altering which countries gain or lose from a given trade policy (Americans and/or people in trading partner countries), we vary the role that in-group favoritism should play in influencing preferences. Our results provide evidence of two distinct forms of in-group favoritism. The first, and least surprising, is that Americans value the well-being of other Americans more than that of people outside their own country. Rather than maximize total gains, Americans choose policies that maximize in-group well-being. This tendency is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority; Americans favor their national in-group to a greater extent if they perceive Americans to be more deserving. Second, high levels of perceived intergroup competition lead some Americans to prefer trade policies that benefit the in-group and hurt the out-group over policies that help both their own country and the trading partner country. For a policy to elicit support, it is important not only that the US benefits, but also that the trading partner country loses so that the US achieves a greater relative advantage. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding bipartisan public opposition to trade.
Diversity and Inequality in the Discipline
“Navigating “Insider” and “Outsider” Status as Researchers Conducting Field Experiments” 2022. PS: Political Science & Politics (with Sumitra Badrinathan, Donghyun Danny Choi, Sabrina Karim, Yang-Yang Zhou)
“The Pandemic and Gender Inequality in Academia” 2022. PS: Political Science & Politics (with Shawn Patterson Jr)
Does the pandemic exacerbate gender inequality in academia? The temporal lag in publication pipeline complicates the effort to determine the extent to which women’s productivity is disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis. We provide real-time evidence by analyzing 1.8 million tweets from approximately 3,000 political scientists, leveraging their use of social media for career advancement. Using automated text analysis and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that while faculty members of both genders were affected by the pandemic, the gap in work-related tweets between male and female academics roughly tripled following work-from-home. We further argue that these effects are likely driven by the increased familial obligations placed on women, as demonstrated by the increase in family-related tweets and the more pronounced effects among junior academics. Our causal evidence on work-family trade-off provides an opportunity for proactive efforts to address gender disparities that may otherwise take years to manifest.
Book Chapters
“Tell the Story of Poverty.” Fixing American Politics: Civic Priorities for the Media Age. Forthcoming. ed. Roderick Hart. Routledge Press.
”Progress and Pitfalls Using Survey Experiments in Political Science.” 2020. Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Decision Making. (with Diana C. Mutz)
“Political Advertising and Media.” 2020. The Oxford Handbook of American Political History, eds. Paula Baker and Donald T. Critchlow. (with Kathleen H. Jamieson)
“Media Effects on Retrospective Economic Perceptions: Partisan Media and Its Implications for Economic Voting.” 2017. The SAGE Handbook of Electoral Behaviour, eds. Kai Arzheimer, Jocelyn Evans, Michael S. Lewis-Beck. London: Sage Publications Ltd. p.733-758. (with Diana C. Mutz)
“History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising.” 2016. The Praeger Handbook of Political Campaigning in the United States. ed. William L. Benoit. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger. p.19-30. (with Kathleen H. Jamieson)