Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Political Science Under Pressure: Competition and Collaboration in an Evolving Discipline, 2003-2023
with Guy Grossman and Will Dinneen
[paper]

Perspectives on Politics (forthcoming)

This study analyzes 140,000+ articles from 174 political science journals (2003-2023) to understand how structural incentives have shaped scholarly production in the discipline. We examine changes in publication volume, researcher productivity, topical content, methodological approaches, and collaboration patterns over two decades. Publication volume tripled, driven by three times more authors and small productivity gains. Further, since 2021, most papers have been co-authored, with teams producing topically more novel research than solo authors. Quantitative methods increasingly dominate, especially in top journals. We also find that, despite paper-level specialization, the discipline maintains topical diversity. Novel research—particularly from all-female teams—receives more citations long-term but appears less frequently in top journals. Overall, political science has transformed into a larger, more collaborative, and more quantitative discipline. Yet these changes occur amid job market contraction and mounting publication pressures that may require researchers to sacrifice career stability and intellectual risk-taking for productivity metrics.

Informal Connections Outweigh Co-authorship Ties in Academic Impact
with Lluís Danús, Will Dinneen, Guy Grossman, and Sandra González-Bailón

PNAS (forthcoming)

Research has documented the importance of teamwork in the form of co-authorship for research productivity and innovation, but we know much less about how informal collaborations relate to academic success. Informal ties allow intangible exchanges like mentoring, guidance, and feedback to flow among scholars: these interactions weave a support structure that improves ideas and encourages project growth. However, these informal exchanges are more difficult to measure because they do not leave as clear a trail as co-authorship ties. Here, we uncover this layer of informal communication around scholarly outputs by parsing the information contained in the acknowledgment sections of published articles. Our data include 130,000 articles authored by 86,000 scholars from the period 2003-2023. We analyze scholars’ embeddedness in this informal structure of collaboration and reveal that (1) informal ties create a larger and denser network of support than co-authorship ties; (2) disconnection from informal networks is associated with gaps in productivity and impact; and (3) informal ties are a more relevant predictor of academic success than formal collaborations, even after matching for gender, seniority, methodology, and geographical location. Using coarsened exact matching and random forest regressions we show that informal structures of support are significantly associated with academic impact, creating gaps in who benefits from those connections.

Under Review

The Political Consequences of “Source Country” Operations: Evidence from Crop Eradication in Mexico
[paper][appendix]

When crafting law enforcement policy, drug-producing — or “source” — countries must adjudicate between domestic preferences and international pressure to curb supply. What are the political consequences of prioritizing supply-reduction? I analyze illicit-crop eradication in Mexico, where the army routinely incinerates fields to ensure continued US aid. Small, marginalized crop-growing communities regard eradication as an unjust federal policy. However, the importance of aid makes the policy inelastic. Because eradication policy is never on the electoral menu, I theorize that eradication decreases trust in the government and reduces turnout instead of engendering electoral backlash. To test, I create a novel eradication measure at the electoral precinct level using data from 50,000 satellite-detected fields and NASA’s satellite-collected fire data. Using variation in location and timing, I show that eradication depresses turnout in federal elections and trust in the army. By divorcing domestic electoral politics from policy, US security aid may undermine accountability.

The Demobilizing Effect of Selective Exposure and Heterogeneous Responses to Violence
[paper][appendix]

Honorable Mention for the APSA Comparative Politics Section Sage Best Paper Award (2024)

Whether those who bear the burden of violence stay in political life or retreat shapes the government’s cost of failing to provide security. Yet much of what we know about the participatory consequences of violence comes from populations unlikely to experience it. I show that when exposure is selective and reactions heterogeneous, population-average effects and effects among the exposed can reverse in sign. I develop a principal stratification framework encoding both features, and a partial identification procedure applicable to any binary treatment and binary outcome. Applied to criminal victimization across 94 surveys in 20 Latin American countries, population-average effects favor mobilization but, contrary to extant findings, effects among the victimized are predominantly negative. Panel evidence from Mexico indicates those likely to demobilize are also more exposed. For treatments that are not universal and that we would never seek to universalize, the causal contrast of first-order importance is among the treated.

Class and the Development of Trust in Police in Latin America
with Tara Slough
[paper][appendix]

Trust in police is a critical input in the co-production of public security. We show that the positive socioeconomic status (SES)-trust in police gradient observed in the US does not generalize to Latin America. In 146 surveys spanning 20 countries, we find that trust in police is weakly and negatively correlated with SES—a fact that neither regional nor subject-matter experts anticipated. We propose that rich citizens are more likely to interpret everyday experiences as signals about the police. Because bad experiences like crime victimization and bribe solicitation are more common in Latin America than in the US, rich citizens’ tendency to interpret poor security outcomes as signals of police untrustworthiness leads to a lower trust– SES gradient. In our account, cross-country differences in the trust–SES gradient are driven by differences in policing outcomes coupled with universal class-based differences in people’s readiness to see the world around them as signals about police.

Democratic Participation without Democrats: Evidence from 109 Countries
with Justin Melnick
[paper and appendix]

In canonical research on civic and political culture, there is an implicit assumption that citizens participate in civic life more when they are committed to democratic rule. We provide descriptive evidence to the contrary using survey data from 551,763 respondents across 109 countries drawn from four major cross-national surveys. We examine whether individuals who express greater or lower tolerance for non-democratic governance and authority vary in their participation rates. Across geographic regions, participation modes, and measures of regime attitudes, we find no consistent association between democratic commitment and participation. Instead, individuals who tolerate military rule, coups, or strongman leadership are often more likely to participate than those who reject such views. The weak-to-null relationship between democratic commitments and participation does not systematically vary with country-level democratic consolidation; participation is not systematically undertaken more by democrats in consolidated democracies. Findings emphasize that while democracy requires participation, participation does not require democrats.

The Credibility Revolution in Political Science
with Will Dinneen, Guy Grossman, and Yiqing Xu
[working paper]

How has the credibility revolution reshaped political science? We address this question by using a large language model to classify 91,632 articles published between 2003 and 2023 across 174 political science journals, focusing on causal research designs, transparency practices, and citation patterns. Design-based studies—research strategies that explicitly specify a research design and the assumptions required for causal identification—have become increasingly common, displacing regression-based analyses that rely primarily on modeling assumptions. Yet as of 2023, studies without an explicit identification strategy still constitute nearly 40% of empirical quantitative work. Within design-based research, survey experiments dominate, while field experiments and quasi-experimental approaches have grown more modestly. Transparency practices such as placebo tests and power analysis remain rare. Design-based studies are concentrated in top journals and among authors at highly ranked institutions, and enjoy a persistent citation premium. The credibility revolution has meaningfully reshaped the discipline, though unevenly and incompletely.

Reducing WhatsApp Usage to Mitigate Misinformation Exposure During Elections: Evidence from a Multi-Country Experiment
with Rajeshwari Majumdar, Tiago Ventura, Shelley Liu, and Joshua A. Tucker

R&R, American Journal of Political Science

Best Paper in Political Behavior Award, 2025 MPSA Annual Conference

Recent scholarly work has investigated how social media platforms increase users’ exposure to misinformation and harmful content, contributing to contemporary democratic ills such as increased levels of polarization, intergroup prejudice, and offline violence. This paper presents two distinct interventions to identify the causal effects of the most heavily used social media messaging app in the world – WhatsApp – on exposure to online misinformation and its downstream effects on political attitudes. We deploy simultaneous field experiments in India and South Africa, incentivizing participants to either (1) reduce exposure to multimedia on WhatsApp or (2) limit overall WhatsApp usage to up to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of their 2024 general elections. Our intervention significantly reduced participants’ exposure to false rumors circulating widely during the election and to overall political news. These changes in the informational environment, however, did not significantly change belief accuracy. We also detected a significant reduction in ethnic-based prejudice in India when participants reduced their overall WhatsApp usage, but estimated precise nulls for polarization outcomes in South Africa.

Works-in-Progress

Endogenous information consumption and behavioral changes
with Kun Heo and Elisa Wirsching

Common wisdom expectations and extant observational research suggest that information is a central shaping force of the political process. Yet, experimental results repeatedly show that providing information to individuals — whether about a candidate’s policy platform, a politician’s misuse of public funds, or public service provision — may result in small or no changes in citizens’ political behavior. We provide a framework that disciplines the conceptual understanding of information as central to citizens’ decision-making with these seemingly disjoint results by focusing on the endogenous consumption and provision of information. Using a formal model, we show that the people whose behavior is most elastic to learning have likely self-selected into learning more in the past and have interim posterior beliefs with smaller variances relative to the rest of the population. Alternatively, the people whose behavior is least elastic to learning have incentives to self-select into consuming new information the least. While these latter groups will have less certain beliefs, they will also be less likely to modify their behavior due to learning new information.