Working Papers

Job Market Paper

The Missing Link: Candidate Choices, Policy Preferences, and Survey Representativeness (with Lonna Atkeson). [Abstract]

Under Review

1. Support and Preference for Grassroots Fundraising (with Seo-young Silvia Kim). [Abstract]
   Do Americans support small individual donations over other sources of political fundraising and does it matter for political behavior? Small online contributions are becoming more prevalent, and political elites and the media often idealize them as leveling the playing field in the American political ecosystem. However, we have little understanding of whether and, if so, how much the public supports small donations as a campaign funding source over others and whether such preferences translate into tangible changes in political behavior. We fill this gap with analyses of original surveys and survey experiments. Our results indicate that the public believes that there should be more small donations in American elections, fewer large individual donations, and to a much lesser extent, fewer PAC contributions. Using multiple conjoint experiments, we test whether candidates with higher dependence on small individual donors are preferred. Surprisingly, candidates relying more on small donors attract a higher likelihood of vote choice, not just within primaries or for Democrats, but across primaries, general elections, and all partisan affiliations. Such beliefs are unshaken when presented with information about lawmakers with the highest reliance on small donors, who are generally perceived as outsiders or ideologically extreme.
2. The Role of Geography and Local Context in Understanding Voting Behavior and Policy Preferences (with Lonna Atkeson and Eli McKown-Dawson). [Abstract]
   American politics is increasingly nationalized and affectively polarized. These trends imply that partisans in different parts of the country behave similarly, and that local political context has become less salient. We challenge this assumption and show that local political conditions interact with partisanship to shape voting behavior and policy preferences. We utilize Cooperative Election Study (CES) data from 10 federal elections between 2006 and 2024 to test how political geographic variation, measured as the average difference in two-party county vote shares in the previous three presidential elections, is associated with behavioral or attitudinal differences among co-partisans. We find substantively interesting differences in voting behavior across electoral contests and policy preferences among co-partisans based on local political context, especially among weak partisans and independent voters. Importantly, these relationships are consistent over time. Our results provide insight into how place and the communities and networks that underlie them influences American political behavior.

Book

Placing Post-Election Audit and Ballot Image Data Online: Obstacles and Solutions (with Lonna Atkeson, Austin Cutler, Carson Cary, Lisa Bryant, and Wendy Hansen). Elements in Elections and Campaigns. Contracted at Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Working Papers

1. Incentivizing Open-Ended Survey Responses [Abstract]
   Open-ended questions have a long history in survey research, but their use grew significantly with the shift from interviewer-led telephone interviews to respondent-driven online surveys. Changes in the survey environment, combined with advances in natural language processing and text analysis methods, make it easier for researchers to ask and analyze open-ended questions. However, concerns about the quality and representativeness of open-ended responses limit the applications of this type of question. In three experiments, I investigate whether providing incentives can improve the quality of open-ended responses and, consequently, enhance the usefulness of open-ended questions. I find that incentives encourage respondents to spend more time answering, produce longer responses, and use a richer vocabulary. Additionally, incentives improve the structural topic models fitted to the responses regarding key quantitative measures. Overall, I present a new and practical approach to increase the quality of open-ended responses and facilitate their analysis.
   -- Presented at APSA 2025.
2. Probabilistic Text Matching: Method and Application to the Study of Media Bias in the U.S. [Abstract]
   Partisan bias enters political news coverage through selective coverage and biased presentation, and understanding the contribution through each channel necessitates estimating the difference in ideological leanings conditional on covering the same events. Political events, however, are an underlying characteristic that is unavailable to researchers absent large-scale hand-coding. In this paper, I propose a novel method to estimate quantities of substantive interest conditional on a hidden characteristic of the text data. The method overcomes difficulties of existing methods that are sensitive to critical tuning parameters and produce biased estimates. Applying the proposed method to the study of media bias, I find the ideological difference between media organizations is not always driven by how events are covered. Instead, the contribution of presentation bias to the total difference in ideological leanings between news articles published by media organizations varies in ways that are consistent with the structural difference between different media types. My results shed light on the exposure of different types of voters to the partisan bias of political news coverage.
   -- Presented at MPSA 2025.
3. Fatigue, Information, and Ballot Roll-Off: Evidence from California's Alternative Ballot Order (with R. Michael Alvarez). [Abstract]
   Voter participation in American local elections has long been a concern of academics and reformers. Voter fatigue and lack of information have been proposed to explain the lower level of participation in down-ballot local contests, but the strength of these theories of ballot roll-off has not been convincingly tested due to the lack of variation in contest order. In this paper, we fill this gap using California's SB-25, a state law that requires Los Angeles County to put local elections at the top of the ballot and state and federal elections down the ballot while maintaining the standard ballot order in other counties. Using difference-in-difference designs, we take advantage of this shuffling of contest order to estimate the causal effects of contest order and substantive contest differences on ballot roll-off. Our results indicate that ballot position itself accounts for half of the gap between turnout in local and state contests.
   -- Presented at EPOVB 2025.
4. The Cognitive Foundations of Conspiratorial Thinking (with Lisa Kluen, Caroline Charpentier, Jeff Cockburn, Tessa Rusch, Sneha Aenugu, Reza Tadayon-Nejad, R. Michael Alvarez, and John O'Doherty). [Abstract]
   Belief in conspiracy theories can be highly detrimental not only for the affected individual, but also for the wellbeing of society as a whole. Despite the importance of understanding the factors that contribute to their prevalence, we currently lack an integrated characterization of which underlying cognitive factors render an individual vulnerable to such beliefs. To address this gap, we utilized a battery of six cognitive tasks targeting distinct but overlapping cognitive attributes spanning different aspects of information processing from information perception, information seeking, and the evaluation and integration of information to make decisions. We then administered this task battery to a large online cohort. When integrating across tasks using unsupervised machine-learning and multivariate statistical methods, we find evidence to suggest that conspiracy believers exhibit a relatively specific but domain general deficit in the ability to effectively integrate and utilize empirical evidence, as well as an increased tendency to misattribute the consequences of their own actions to the interference of others. These effects were found to be associated with conspiracy beliefs even after controlling for the effects of other psychiatrically relevant symptom dimensions such as schizotypy, anxiety, worry and depression. Our findings thus suggest the existence of a specific cognitive phenotype underlying susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs, which in turn could point the way toward more targeted interventions to mitigate their influence.
5. Calibration Weighting, Matching, or Multilevel Regression with Poststratification? A Validation Study (with Lonna Atkeson and Austin Cutler).
   -- Presented at Polmeth 2026. Draft available upon request.
6. Election Transparency: Do Postelection Audits Improve Voter Confidence? (with Lonna Atkeson, Austin Cutler, Sarah Case, and Marli Dunietz).
   -- Presented at ESRA 2026. Draft available upon request.
7. Conspiracy Beliefs, Climate and Environmental Attitudes, and Sustainable Behavior (with R. Michael Alvarez).
   -- Draft available upon request.
8. Attention Checks and Respondent Behavior (with R. Michael Alvarez).
   -- Draft available upon request.