Graduate Students
IRiSS Dissertation Fellows
Allison's dissertation examines the effect of racial segregation and social norms on political participation in the United States. Through original survey experiments, observational data, and qualitative research, she demonstrates that racial segregation leads to variance in social norms regarding the value and meaning of political action in America. This variance alters the rate at which individuals choose to become active, producing differences in aggregate participatory patterns.
Adriane Fresh
Political Science
Micro-data on the distribution of political power within the British Isles
Adriane's dissertation examines the relationship between political inequality -- operationalized as the concentration of formal political power within families and economic interest groups -- on long-run economic and political development, as well as its relationship with institutional change. Utilizing an original dataset on all Members of Parliament (MPs) who served in the House of Commons in Britain spanning five centuries, she leverages within-country variation to examine the long-run relationship between historical political inequality on late 19th century economic welfare, econ
Azusa Katagiri
Political Science
Essays on Interstate Crises and Audience: A Text Analysis Approach to US Foreign Relations
Policymakers conduct foreign policy in the presence of domestic and international audiences―especially in the midst of interstate crises that may precipitate armed conflict. My dissertation project aims to study the roles of the audience in interstate crises by applying text analysis and machine learning techniques to vast bodies of newly digitized documents from the United States government.
Structural modeling is a powerful tool for understanding the economic environment to which economic policy applies. However, oftentimes multiple competing structural models can explain a set of outcomes seen in the data. Then it becomes necessary to choose between the two competing structural models. Furthermore, many nonparametric econometric model estimation techniques require specifying tuning parameters, whose choice also amounts to model selection.
Careers in bureaucracy are an important topic of interdisciplinary inquiries. Bureaucracy, as one of the most prevalent organizational forms, promotes specialization and impersonalized rules, and allegedly selects personnel based on the principles of seniority and meritocracy. Field research, however, observes rampant political favoritism and sponsorship in bureaucratic appointment. My dissertation research is motivated by the tension between the theoretical ideal type and empirical observations of bureaucratic careers.
Ariela Schachter
Sociology
Immigration and the Shifting Landscape of Americans' Racial AttitudesCan’t We All Just Get Along? Native-born Americans’ Perspectives on Race and Immigration
How do native-born Americans understand and react to immigration-driven diversity? My dissertation explores this question in three distinct empirical projects. Using a combination of original survey experiments and secondary survey data, I examine the causal effects of a growing immigrant population on the attitudes and behaviors of native-born Americans.
Ashley Shurick
Psychology
Using Cognitive Reappraisal and Decision Support to Increase Physical Activity
Ian Simpson
Anthropology
Religious Redirection: Muslim-Christian Interaction in Environmental and Commercial Networks
My dissertation examines the relationship between religion, urban markets and human-environmental relations through an archaeological and historical study of market interaction and social change in urban centers in the Middle East (600-900 CE). My research conceptualizes this relationship from a network perspective to explore interaction and cooperation between different religious groups. I draw on datasets relating to market networks for a number of sites in the east Mediterranean and the Arabian-Persian Gulf.
My dissertation focuses on the labor market outcomes associated with intermittent labor force participation. I ask how gaps in employment affect the labor market re-entry process, including hiring, wages, and occupational prestige. Furthermore, to what extent does the reason behind an employment lapse (unemployment, family obligations, etc.) matter in producing eventual labor market rewards? Finally, given that women and mothers are particularly likely to partake in leave to care for family, to what extent do effects vary by gender and parental status? I use a number of causal estimation techniques to test these processes, in order to provide a holistic view of the processes of labor market re-entry for those with interrupted employment.
The findings show that the reason behind a lapse in employment matters when regaining employment. Those who “opted out” or took time off of work for family reasons are disadvantaged in hiring relative to unemployed individuals, and the unemployed are penalized relative to the continuously employed. Parents who have “opted out” face additional penalties compared to childless applicants. The pattern of findings is similar for men and women – both men and women who have “opted out” face bias relative to the unemployed.
Survey Lab Students
Jonathan Chu
Political Science
International Organizations and Mobilizing Support for Humanitarian Intervention
When considering military humanitarian intervention, the United States and other western countries virtually always seek the approval of international organizations (IOs). Countries do so, in part, in order to mobilize support among their citizens back home. Using original American public opinion data, this project examines the differing effects of the UN Security Council and NATO on public attitudes toward intervention. It asks both whether and how these two IOs move public attitudes. Finally, this project not only sheds light on the relationship between IOs and the public, but also the relationship between the Security Council and NATO: insofar as Security Council and NATO support are substitutes, countries belonging to both can leverage their multiple options when bargaining for IO support.
My research investigates the factors behind support for or opposition to immigration in the United States. I analyze the impact of norms—standards of conduct dictated by a person’s identity—on political attitudes. In my dissertation, I use survey experiments to capture the negative effect of norm violations on attitudes toward Latinos and immigrants. This project builds on my dissertation by focusing on the pre-existing assumptions respondents make about Latinos’ and immigrants’ propensities to violate norms. I seek to understand whether White respondents believe Latino immigrants violate norms more than do South and East Asian immigrants, European immigrants, and immigrants from the Middle East. Additionally, I seek to show that a negative reaction to norm violations does actually stem from the feeling that the collective cultural American identity is threatened, not from sociotropic financial concerns. Finally, I hope to analyze the reactions of groups beyond White Americans, such as African Americans, to norm violations by Latinos in the U.S.
Political scientists and political theorists continue to debate how to understand American beliefs about inequality, distributive justice, and fairness. Whether one subscribes to the belief that American views are ambivalent, erroneous, and uninformed, or that they are consistent and coherent, the conditions under which Americans believe inequality to be acceptable or “fair” remains unclear. In this project, I hope to disentangle American beliefs about the fairness of poverty on one hand, from the fairness of inequality on the other. I also test how different descriptive framings of inequality and its consequences effect respondents' levels of support for redistributive policies.
Craig Neuman
Political Science
Sanctions as Off-Ramps: Do Economic Sanctions Provide Leaders a Cheap Way Out of Military Threats?
My research is focused on whether leaders pay lower audience costs when they couple economic sanctions to their military threats. When leaders issue compellent demands of other states, they are faced with the choice of preceding their military threats with economic sanctions (escalated threats) or forgoing the use of sanctions all together (military-only threats). If leaders ultimately back down from their threats of force, sanctions may provide an excuse to ameliorate domestic backlash. Specifically, leaders may argue that sanctions require more time to work, or at minimum can point to the punishment already inflicted on the target state to minimize their audience costs. If leaders incur lower audience costs when using sanctions, this decision to “weakly” tie their hands with escalated threats (compared to the more costly military-only threats) may signal lower resolve to their targets.
Katharina Roesler
Sociology
Class Bias and Perceived Consensus in Moral Evaluations, or When Does it Pay to Be Rich?
My project examines the conditions under which people express class bias in their moral evaluations of others. In particular, I hypothesize that when people believe there is low consensus about a non-normative behavior, they will judge working-class individuals less moral than upper-middle class individuals who engage in it. I predict that a lack of consensus will make evaluators uncertain how to respond (in the first- and third-order), causing them to use moral expectations that disadvantage working class individuals to evaluate the behavior. On the other hand, when people believe there is high consensus about the behavior, they will express bias against upper-middle class actors, whose behavior challenges the evaluators’ moral expectations, making them anxious and angry. By the same token, working class individuals in high-consensus conditions may be evaluated more favorably than in low-consensus conditions, as they confirm evaluators’ moral expectations more in the former.
Sociologists have long defined assimilation as the decline of social boundaries between in-groups and out-groups. Native-born Americans play a key role in defining these social boundaries and thus in immigrant assimilation. In this project I argue that native-born Americans’ perceptions of the social boundaries among groups is a critical, previously ignored measure of assimilation. I plan to develop attitudinal measures of these social boundaries, and then test key mechanisms that contribute to the construction and deconstruction of social boundaries, including conceptions of American identity, culture, and values. I will also compare the responses of native-born White, Black, and Latino Americans to one another.
Ken Shores
Center for Education Policy Analysis
Funding Education: Trading Income for Achievement Gap Closure
My project concerns the role that education plays in narrowing income inequality in the United States. If, as I assume, education is seen as a popular way to narrow income inequality, I wish to know what explains this emphasis. One way of testing this is to see if people care more about narrowing income inequality through education than they do about income inequality itself. If they do, this would imply that education does something else that people value. I hypothesize that individuals regard the distribution of skills as distinctly valuable, and that they are willing to sacrifice some income in order to narrow the skills distribution.
David Traven
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Perspective-Taking, Empathy, and the Morality of Killing in War
As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, I am currently preparing a book manuscript on the evolution of civilian protection norms in international politics. In this book, I argue that moral psychology and emotions shaped the creation of the regime for protecting the victims of war. Since many IR theorists believe that moral intuitions have little to no effect on strategic decision-making in war, in this part of my project I am using survey experiments to understand how moral intuitions and emotions shape individual judgments on military strategies that lead to civilian casualties. I have two main hypotheses: (1) I hypothesize that inducing respondents to take the perspective of non-combatants will alter how they calculate the strategic benefits and costs of military policies, and in particular it will reduce their calculations of perceived benefits, yet increase their calculations of perceived costs; and (2) I hypothesize that induced empathy will encourage respondents to be more inclined to view the civilian casualties that result from specific tactics as intentional. This survey experiment will make two main contributions to international relations scholarship. First, it will help resolve the debate over whether strategic calculations or moral norms shape decisions to use force. If (1) is correct, this will show that moral capacities such as perspective-taking and empathy do in fact shape conceptions of self-interest. Second, this study will help international legal scholars understand how people judge whether civilian deaths were intended or not, which is crucial for determining whether war crimes have taken place.
David Vannette
Communication
Does Data Visualization Influence the Effects of Polls on Political Attitudes?
It is now common for public opinion data to be presented graphically. How visual modes of public opinion data representation may influence the type and magnitude of poll effects observed on political attitudes and behaviors is a new and important question in political communication research. While a growing body of research has demonstrated the potential for the poll reporting in the news to influence attitudes and behaviors of those exposed, no research has tested different modes of public opinion data presentation. Prior research has emphasized the effects of polling information and the implications for important political outcomes. However, the distinctions between textual and graphical representations of polling information have not been explicitly examined. Similarly, a growing literature in cognitive psychology has emphasized the important role of the mode in which information is presented in terms of how it is processed, remembered, and acted upon. However, many of the recommendations for information presentation from cognitive psychology have not been examined in terms of their potential for influencing substantive outcomes such as political attitudes or behaviors in response to political information. This study proposes to examine the question of how modes of public opinion information presentation, textual or graphical, may differentially influence the type and magnitude of poll effects observed. In the future I plan to extend this research into looking how interactive data tools, such as those on the New York Times or the Huffington Post, may influence political attitudes.
Kate Weisshaar
Sociology
Mechanisms Explaining Perceptions Toward Individuals with Intermittent Labor Force Participation
My research examines the interaction of common interest group rhetoric with the race and gender of group representatives. This project explores whether the persuasiveness of arguments relating to gun control is conditional on the race and gender of the speaker. I experimentally test whether common pro-gun arguments elicit varying levels of support when employed by speakers with varying characteristics. Read more about past Survey Lab Students
CSS Fellows
It has been claimed that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to help bridge the education gap in developing countries. However, many students from developing nations are underachieving in MOOCS. This project proposes that this is due to identity threat (academic achievement gaps attributed to uncertainty about social belonging due to race, gender, or social status). It then addresses two questions: why do members of developing countries experience identity threat in international learning settings and are members of developing countries disadvantaged due to bias and identity threat in other high-stakes contexts?
This project will build a model for performing continuous multimodal emotion inference from linguistic, audio, visual and psycho-physiological (e.g., skin conductance, heart rate) cues. This model will help researchers understand how humans understand changes in the emotions of others, how emotion inference is affected in mental disorders, and will aid in building emotionally aware computational agents in the field of artificial intelligence.
The online labor market is a new economic labor system where people work as contractors using online platforms like ODesk, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and TaskRabbit to connect to potential employers. This project analyzes the problems that occur in a system where many of the employers have little to no experience in designing, defining, and managing work, and there is little oversight of the contractors in terms of qualifications and commitment they have to working on projects.
Bradley Spahn
Political Science
Uncovering Political History using the Complete California Voter Records, 1900 - 1968
Beginning in 1867, the state of California required all eligible California voters to register to vote. This created a database with the occupation, name, address, and party affiliation of every California voter. This project uses computational methods to explore a period of extraordinary enfranchisement and change in America by analyzing trends in voting records related to women gaining the right to vote, the Great Depression, and employment shifts.
To prevent rebellions and coups, autocrats wish to implement policies that the majority of people are in favor of. Because autocratic regimes have trouble understanding the public’s true opinion, this project uses computational methods to examine how governments strategically release feelers of policy ideas to the public, monitor discussion about the feelers on social media, and choose to confirm, deny, or adjust the policies based on the public discussion. Read about past CSS Fellows >>
