Research

This is my main research agenda. In these projects, I study how people perceive income differences, how economic inequality affects their political attitudes, and how they reason about taxation.

Papers on this topic:

Cavaille, Charlotte and Kris-Stella Trump. 2015. “The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences.” The Journal of Politics, 77(1):146-160.

This research agenda started with my Ph.D. dissertation, defended in 2013, which you can access here: “The Status Quo and Perceptions of Fairness: How Income Inequality Influences Public Opinion”

Media and other mentions on this topic:

The Monkey Cage, Vox.com, Boston Review, The Week, Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Stumbling and Mumbling, Der Standard, Der Spiegel.

“Black Lives Matter: Evidence that Police-Caused Deaths Predict Protest Activity” (with Vanessa Williamson and Katherine Levine Einstein). 2018. Perspectives on Politics, 77 (1), 146-160. (gated link, ungated link)

Abstract: Since 2013, protests opposing police violence against Black people have occurred across a number of American cities under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” We develop a new dataset of Black Lives Matter protests that took place in 2014–2015 and explore the contexts in which they emerged. We find that Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more Black people have previously been killed by police. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of the literature on the development of social movements and recent scholarship on the carceral state’s impact on political engagement.

• This study was the subject of a panel debate at Brookings Institution on June 19, 2018 (video available at link).
• A summary by Vanessa Williamson also appeared on the Brookings Institution blog.
• Media mentions: Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight, The Daily Mining Gazette

In 2016-2017 I was a research fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the General Service Administration. While there, I worked on a portfolio of randomized controlled trials related to improving government communications to encourage vaccine uptake. This work has resulted in two academic publications:

“Lessons for COVID-19 Vaccination from Eight Federal Government Direct Communication Evaluations” (with Heather Barry Kappes, Mattie Tomal, Rekha Balu, Russ Burnett, Nuole Chen, Rebecca Johnson, Jessica
Leight, Saad B. Omer, Elana Safran, Mary Steffel, David Yokum, and Pompa Debroy). You can access an ungated preprint here.

Abstract: We discuss eight randomized evaluations intended to increase vaccination uptake conducted by the US General Services Administration’s Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES). These evaluations had a median sample size of 55,000, deployed a variety of behaviorally-informed direct communications, and used administrative data to measure vaccination uptake. The confidence interval from an internal meta-analysis shows changes in vaccination rates ranging from -0.004 to 0.394 percentage points. Two studies yielded statistically significant increases, of 0.59 and 0.16 percentage points. The other six were not statistically significant, although the studies were powered to detect effect sizes in line with published research. This work highlights the likely effects of government communications and demonstrates the value of conducting rapid evaluations to support COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

“The Effect of Postcard Reminders on Vaccinations Among the Elderly: A Block-Randomized Experiment” (with Nuole Chen, Stacy Hall, and Quan Le). Accepted at Behavioural Public Policy. The official version is here; you can access an ungated preprint here.

Abstract: Prior research in the behavioral sciences has demonstrated that reminders can be an effective tool for encouraging health-related behavior changes. This article extends that literature by reporting the outcome of a randomized control trial of mailed vaccination reminders. In addition to making a substantive contribution regarding the efficacy of mailed reminders, this article also makes a methodological contribution: it illustrates how researchers can study the causal impact of an intervention even when a pure parallel trial is not possible. In this study, the Louisiana Department of Health sent postcard reminders regarding four recommended vaccinations (influenza, tetanus, shingles, and pneumonia) to 208,867 senior residents of Louisiana. We used block randomization and a stepped wedge design to assess the efficacy of the intervention. Individuals were blocked by their prior vaccine record and randomized to receive the postcard in one of four consecutive months (October-January). The reminder postcard had an overall positive effect on vaccination rates. The statistically significant and substantively small increase in overall vaccination rates was driven by participants who received the postcard reminder early in the intervention period.

• We published a blog post on this research on 3Streams.

“The Polarizing Effect of the Stimulus: Partisanship and Voter Responsiveness to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” (with Katherine Einstein and Vanessa Williamson). 2016. Presidential Studies Quarterly 46 (2) 264-283 (gated link, ungated link)

Abstract: We examine the effect of a sudden influx of government spending, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), on support for the President’s party. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that stimulus spending had a modest positive effect on Democratic vote share, but only in counties that were already Democratic-leaning. In Republican counties, by contrast, government spending had a small, but significant negative effect on Democratic vote share. That is to say, ARRA polarized already partisan places. These results have important implications for the study of voter responsiveness to government spending and the measurement of the political effects of policy visibility.

• We published a blog post summarizing this article on Washington Post’s The Monkey Cage.

“The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data” (with Ariel White). 2018. Urban Affairs Review 54 (4) 794-823 (gated link, ungated link)

Abstract: Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures. We compare geographically aggregated 311 call data with three other measures of political and civic participation: voter turnout, political donations, and census return rates. We show that rates of 311 calls are negatively related to lower cost activities (voter turnout and census return rates), but positively related to the high-cost activity of campaign donation. We caution against interpreting 311 data as a generic measure of political engagement or participation, at least in the absence of high-quality controls for neighborhood condition. However, we argue that these data are still potentially useful for researchers, because they are by definition a measure of the service demands that neighborhoods place on city governments.

• We published a blog post summarizing this article on the Urban Affairs Review blog.