My research focuses on perceptions of deservingness, especially in the context of economic outcomes. If politics is about who gets what, when, and how, then political judgments generally start with a sense of who deserves what, when, and how. My projects explore how we reason about deservingness in various situations.
For example, do CEO’s deserve their generous pay packages? If yes, then it becomes more difficult to argue that top incomes should be taxed more heavily. Looking at the less well-to-do, how do we differentiate between the poor who we think deserve help and those who do not? And when are outcomes so clearly undeserved that we go out on the streets in protest?
My research has been published in journals including The Journal of Politics, The British Journal of Political Science, and Perspectives on Politics.
Click on the research topics below to reveal project summaries and abstracts, as well as links to blog posts and media coverage.
If you would prefer to see a chronological list of my published papers, click here to access my CV.
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Reactions to top-end income inequality How do we think about whether very high incomes are deserved and appropriate? In this project I use survey and laboratory experiments to show that finding out about high CEO pay causes people to think of higher CEO pay as appropriate (compared to not knowing how much CEO’s make). However, this information does not make people any more dissatisfied with inequality than they already were. Overall, I argue that living in an environment marked by high top-end inequality makes people likely to think of very high incomes as deserved. This counter-intuitive effect can explain why increasing inequality is not necessarily met with public disapproval. I am currently working on extensions to this project, including a paper on the determinants of public support for taxing the rich. Redistributing 'from the rich' vs. redistributing 'to the poor' “The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences” (with Charlotte Cavaillé). 2015. The Journal of Politics, 77 (1), 146-160. (gated link, ungated link) Abstract: Most political economy models start from the assumption that economic self-interest is a key predictor of support for income redistribution. A growing literature, in contrast, emphasizes the role of “other-oriented” concerns, such as social solidarity or affinity for the poor. These frameworks generate distinct, often conflicting predictions about variation in mass attitudes toward redistribution. We argue that this tension is in part an artifact of conceptualizing demand for redistribution as unidimensional, and propose distinguishing between redistribution conceived as taking from the “rich” and redistribution conceived as giving to the “poor”. These two facets of redistribution prime different individual motives: self-oriented income-maximization on the one hand, and other-oriented social affinity with welfare beneficiaries on the other. We find strong evidence for this framework using British longitudinal survey data and cross-sectional data from four advanced industrial countries. We discuss the implications for studying changes in mass support for redistributive social policies. Determinants of Black Lives Matter protests “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. Income inequality and the desire to believe the world is a fair place “Does inequality beget inequality? Experimental tests of the prediction that inequality increases system justification motivation” (with Ariel White). 2018. Journal of Experimental Political Science 5(3), 206-216. (gated link, ungated link) Abstract: Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of System Justification Theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justification. This could yield a negative feedback loop in which political responses to inequality grows ever less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Previous research on this hypothesis relied on cross-sectional survey data and provided mixed results. We take an experimental approach and ask whether exposure to economic inequality makes people more likely to defend the system. In one main study and two replications with varying samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation. Communications to encourage vaccine uptake 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 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. Partisan reactions to government spending “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. The promises and pitfalls of using 311 data in social science “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.
Leight, Saad B. Omer, Elana Safran, Mary Steffel, David Yokum, and Pompa Debroy). You can access an ungated preprint here.