WORKING PROJECTS

Projects in Progress

“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

“How Social Media Creators Shape Mass Politics: A Field Experiment during the 2024 US Elections” with Kirill Chmel, John Marshall, Tiffany Love-Fisher, Nathaniel Lubin

Political apathy and skepticism of traditional authorities are increasingly common, but social media creators (SMCs) capture the public's attention. Yet whether these seemingly-frivolous actors shape political attitudes and behaviors remains largely unknown. Our pre-registered field experiment encouraged Americans aged 18-45 to start following five progressive-minded SMCs on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube between August and December 2024. We varied recommendations to follow SMCs producing predominantly-political (PP), predominantly-apolitical (PA), or entirely non-political (NP) content, and cross-randomized financial incentives to follow assigned SMCs. Beyond markedly increasing consumption of assigned SMCs' content, biweekly quiz-based incentives increased overall social media use by 10% and made participants more politically knowledgeable. These incentives to follow PP or PA SMCs led participants to adopt more liberal policy positions and grand narratives around election time, while PP SMCs more strongly shaped partisan evaluations and vote choice. PA SMCs were seen as more informative and trustworthy, generating larger effects per video concerning politics. Participants assigned to follow NP SMCs instead became more conservative, consistent with left-leaning participants using social media more when right-leaning content was ascendant. These effects exceed the impacts of traditional campaign outreach and partisan media, demonstrating the importance of SMCs as opinion leaders in the attention economy as well as trust-and volume-based mechanisms of political persuasion.

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

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.