Research

Working Papers

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

R&R AJPS

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.

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

Under Review

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’s 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.

The Evolving Landscape of Political Science: TwoDecades of Scholarship in a Growing Discipline
with Guy Grossman and Will Dinneen
[paper]

Under Review

This study examines publication trends in political science over the past two decades(2003–2023), analyzing over 140,000 articles from 174 peer-reviewed journals. Usingbibliometric methods and text-as-data innovations, the study investigates key aspectsof scholarly output, including research volume, author productivity, topical focus,methodological approaches, and research design choices. We find that political sci-ence is a growing discipline primarily driven by an increasing number of contributingauthors rather than individual productivity gains. The study documents a shift towardquantitative methods and the rise and decline of various research designs. Addition-ally, it explores the relationship between research specialization, topical novelty, andscholarly impact, revealing that novelty and focus in research are not associated withplacement in top outlets but, conditional on publication, topically-focused and novelresearch is often better cited. The findings provide a comprehensive overview of theevolving landscape of political science scholarship, offering insights into future researchavenues.

Works-in-Progress

The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Exposure to Violence
Draft Available Upon Request

Theoretical accounts of the participatory effects of violence suggest it demobilizes some individuals but mobilizes others, making exposure patterns critical for understanding consequences. I develop a principal stratification framework incorporating heterogeneous treatment probabilities to assess the implications of accounting for systematic over/underexposure to violence. Empirically, I focus on criminal violence. Work targeting average treatment effects shows crime spurs participation. However, criminology research suggests that people are heterogeneously vulnerable to crime. Using survey data from 150,000 Latin Americans, panel data from Mexico, and millions of simulations, I demonstrate that individuals who participate less post-victimization are more likely to become victims, resulting in an overall negative change of non-electoral participation due to crime. Similar patterns emerge when reassessing results from civil war exposure and police contact. These results challenge our understanding of violence’s political consequences and highlight the distinction between how violence could shape politics and how, in fact, it does so.

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.

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

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