The Tuesday Talks Series is scheduled during the spring and fall semesters, with speakers invited to discuss cutting-edge topics and present new research. Occasionally talks are given on subjects relevant to students such as career management. CGU and Claremont Colleges Consortium faculty, students, staff, and alumni are encouraged to attend. The series is several decades-long and DPE is excited to continue the tradition.
Unless otherwise announced, all seminars are scheduled from 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm. The format for the talks this semester is hybrid, with the option to attend in person–usually at Burkle 12 in the Drucker building–or online via Zoom. Please use the Zoom links below to register for that talk. For those attending in person, a light lunch will be provided.
Spring 2026
02/03/2026
Jean Schroedel, CGU
“The Political Economy of Indian Boarding Schools”
Indian boarding schools are widely understood as instruments of cultural assimilation and Indigenous dispossession, yet little research has examined the local political and economic forces that sustained them. This project studies the Rapid City Indian School (1898–1934), a federally operated off-reservation boarding school serving primarily Oceti Sakowin (Sioux) students. Using a mixed-methods case study drawing on archival records, congressional materials, land title histories, and over 7,000 newspaper articles, this project analyzes how Rapid City elites actively pursued the school as an economic development strategy.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/10/2026
Tyler Reny, CGU
“Copaganda: The Cultural Foundations of Police Trust”
Despite widespread evidence and news coverage of police misconduct, public trust in American law enforcement remains remarkably stable. This persistence challenges foundational assumptions about institutional legitimacy—that trust derives primarily from real-world performance and lived experience. We argue that entertainment media offers an alternative basis for institutional trust through repeated exposure to heroic police narratives that can reframe contradictory realities. Using text analysis of television scripts, we document consistent pro-police narratives across top-rated “cop drama” programming. Four national surveys reveal robust associations between media exposure and favorable policing attitudes. Two experiments show that entertainment media cultivates trust in police across racial groups and experiential divides, including among those whose direct encounters contradict media portrayals. Effects emerge regardless of viewers’ content preferences. In a democracy increasingly shaped by mediated narratives, trust may flow not to the most accountable institutions, but to those most effectively mythologized.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/17/2026
Graham Straus, UCLA, PhD Candidate
“How Does Income Affect Voting Behavior?“
How does income affect voting behavior? Existing work is clear: there is a large turnout gap between high- and low-income voters. A widely-held assumption derived from this between-person relationship is that changes in any given person’s income should cause a change in that same person’s political participation. Recent work has interrogated this assumption using within-person economic windfalls, however, and found no subsequent effects on turnout. Using public records requests for data on the salaries of US public employees and other administrative data on over 570,000 people, I examine whether enduring changes to annual income between 2014 and 2020 affect political participation. The public employee data span everyone from custodial workers to college professors and cover a total of over 13,000 different occupations. I link the salary records to administrative data on voter registration and turnout to track within-person changes in income and participation over time. Results suggest that for a given person, changes in annual income correspond to extremely small changes in turnout. The effect is at most one-fifth the size of the gap estimated using conventional cross-sectional designs that compare the turnout rates of otherwise similar voters with marginally different incomes. Data on salary trajectories within occupations suggests turnout patterns may be more a function of selection than individual economic incentives. These findings have implications for our understanding of what drives political participation as well as the types of policy interventions that might affect it.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/24/2026
Dr. Zachary Courser, CMC
“How Earmarking Functions in Congress: Who Gets What, Why and How”
Earmarking as a political practice has been under-theorized in political science scholarship, and where there is a lack of theory there cannot be an adequate empirical analysis. Combining original data, past scholarship, and interviews with former congressional staff and former members of the House, Courser offers an empirical foundation for understanding earmarking’s core functions in Congress. His talk will explore earmarking’s role in shaping the work of representation, its contribution to universal distribution of federal spending, and its use as a tool of coalition-building within the legislative process.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/03/2026
Angelo Dagonel, Harvard, PhD Candidate
“Legislative Agenda Setting in the American Immigration Bureaucracy, 1965-2020“
The saliency of immigration politics brings to surface recurrent questions about the legislative capability to influence bureaucracy. Most questions focus on a gridlocked inability to pass reform bills. However the administrative arms which implement immigration policy are subject to frequent oversight across its conflicting responsibilities of enforcement and service. Oversight hearings offer a great opportunity to understand what Congress prioritizes for the bureaucracy, and where alignment, persuasion, and disagreement occurs. This paper uses a corpora of subcommittee hearings on the administration of immigration policy from 1965 to 2020 to describe when and why enforcement and service are prioritized in agenda setting discourses between legislators and bureaucratic executives.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/10/2026
Laura Uribe, UCSD, PhD Candidate
“Within-Group Status Hierarchy and its Impact on Latine Politics”
Why do some Latines express political preferences that diverge from conventional wisdom concerning their political behavior? This puzzle has gained urgency amid prominent media attention to Latine voters expressing Republican voting behavior and conservative policy preferences. Drawing on 33 in-depth interviews across eight cities, I introduce the concept of the within-group status hierarchy: a framework that theorizes how marginalized group members perceive themselves relative to other members of their marginalized group, which influences their policy preferences and political behaviors. Findings from a national survey of Latines (N=1,500) suggests that Latines who see themselves as higher-status within the La- tine community often engage in political group distancing, which I conceptualize as favoring stricter immigration policies, opposing aid to low-income co-ethnics, and embracing conservative stances that align more with dominant-group interests than with co-ethnic solidarity. This pattern holds even after controlling for demographics and partisanship. By shifting focus from inter-group to intra-group dynamics, this research offers a new framework for understanding how perceived status within an ethnoracial group can challenge expectations of political solidarity.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/24/2026
Dr. Laura Evans, UC Riverside
“Endowed With the Same Right and Claim: Native Nations, Congressional Relations, and Federal Indian Boarding Schools”
This paper considers the determinants of the political frames used by Native American advocates in their testimony before Congress from 1889 to 1933. I draw on a sample of Congressional hearings where Native American tribal leaders were witnesses, and I explore the relationship between chosen political frames and the types of boarding schools where a tribe’s children had been sent. During most of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the US government forcibly removed thousands of Native American children from their families and detained them in federal Indian boarding schools. Boarding schools varied tremendously in their organization and operation. Furthermore, most boarding schools were short-lived—schools frequently merged, moved, or shut down, to be replaced by new schools. This paper uses newly-available data to consider the consequences of boarding schools for tribal leaders’ broader communications with federal officials. I draw on the findings of the US Department of Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which generated detailed profiles of all federal Indian boarding schools in operation from 1819 to 1969.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/31/2026
Gulce Safak Ozedemir, Harvard University
“Urban Solidarity and (In)Visibility: Rethinking Irregular Migration”
This talk brings together findings from a dissertation on European cities’ responses to irregular migrants and the ongoing postdoctoral project, VIMUS ((In)Visibility of Illegalized Migrants in Urban Settings). The dissertation examines how local governments engage with irregular migration across three lenses. First, it develops a typology of urban solidarity, tracing practices that range from top-down to bottom-up forms of support. Second, drawing on fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 13 European cities, it identifies the configurations that enable municipal activism, particularly alliances between local governments and civil society organizations, alongside political misalignment between local and national authorities. Third, an in-depth ethnographic case study shifts attention to migrants’ everyday lives, examining how the (in)visibility paradox takes shape through institutional practices, processes of marginalization, and migrants’ own strategies shaped by intersecting identities.
Building on these findings, VIMUS extends the analysis by foregrounding how race, gender, class, religion, and legal status intersect to structure migrants’ everyday lives in urban settings. It asks how legal and policy frameworks interact with these dimensions to produce shifting forms of visibility and invisibility.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/07/2026
Dr. Josie Xiao, St. Mary’s College
“Prosecuting for the In-Group: Victim and Defendant Race Bias from Random Assignment”
This paper investigates how the racial match of prosecutors, defendants, and victims affects charging decisions and case outcomes. Adding to the existing research that documents same-race favoritism between prosecutors and defendants in certain crimes, this study contributes by examining the added effect of victim race. Leveraging the random assignment of prosecutors in a large district attorney’s office, I find evidence of both same-defendant-race favoritism and added same-victim-race favoritism, with the latter being more influential. Compared to non-White prosecutors, White prosecutors are 7%-20% more likely to dismiss charges, relative to the mean, when the defendant is of the same race but the victim is not. However, when both the defendant and victim share the prosecutor’s race, White prosecutors are 15%-23% less likely to dismiss charges. These biases significantly impact case outcomes in person crimes, with a 17% decrease in convictions for same-race defendants but an 29% increase for same-race victims. The results not only provide evidence of same-race favoritism among prosecutors but also highlight that prosecutors tend to favor victims of their own racial group more strongly than defendants.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/14/2026
Dr. Magdalena Breyer, University of Basel, Switzerland
“The Political Consequences of Competing Identities in the Working Class”
A salient working-class identity is assumed to be key to mobilizing workers against trends of growing inequality, precarious employment, and decreasing unionization. However, post-industrial transformations and demographic changes have led to a more heterogeneous working class consisting of service and production workers, women and men, ethnic majorities and minorities. In this article, we use an innovative point allocation survey item to answer the following research question: How salient is class compared to other identities for production and service workers, and how does identity salience affect party support for left- and far-right parties? Based on identity theory, we argue that competing identities in the working class have important consequences for the mobilization and politicization of class inequality. We rely on original survey data from five European countries (Germany, Switzerland, UK, Sweden, France). Our results show that workers do not have a salient class identity. For service workers, gender and national identities are clearly more important, while a rural identity stands out for production workers. However, we also show that for service workers, a higher class identity salience increases the propensity to vote left and decreases the support for far right parties. Even though this pattern does not hold for production workers, it shows that left-wing parties can mobilize the new working class by making working-class identities salient.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/21/2026
Annie Frew, CGU DPP Candidate, Cal Poly SLO
“Equity in Every Drop: Evaluating California’s SB 200 and Access to Clean Drinking Water in Disadvantaged Communities”
This study examines the implementation and early impacts of California’s Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund (SB 200), a landmark policy designed to address long-standing disparities in access to clean and safe drinking water in disadvantaged communities. Using a mixed-methods evaluation framework, the research combines a difference-in-differences analysis of community-level drinking water risk indicators with qualitative interviews from state agencies, technical assistance providers, and advocacy groups. The study evaluates whether SB 200 has improved drinking water outcomes, identifies variation in implementation across communities, and assesses the role of community advocacy and political participation in shaping policy effectiveness. By centering environmental justice and implementation dynamics, the research contributes to broader discussion on equity-focused policy design, state capacity, and the conditions under which redistributive environmental policies translate into measurable improvements for historically under-resourced communities.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/28/2026
Dr. Patrick Rhamey, Virginia Militiary Institute
“Unraveling: The End of the American Order”
The talk examines the current unraveling of the American order fueled by Trump’s foreign policy. First, we will examine the unraveling’s origins and immediate consequences. Then, we will identify the potential trajectories for American foreign policy and the international strategic response. In so doing, the lecture will evaluate potential futures for a new order, American or otherwise. Finally, we’ll discuss strategic recommendations for the liberal international community absent American leadership.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
05/05/2026
Dr. Stan Oklobdzija, UC Riverside
“Single Family Schoolyards”
Though the Supreme Court’s 1955 decision in *Brown v. Board of Education* outlawed explicit segregation of public schools, segregation has remained stubbornly persistent in the intervening decades. What explains continuous racial segregation in the absence of explicit policy? One possible driver is America’s built environment–designed with similar segregationist impulses but not subject to corrective legal action. Zoning and land use policy may inhibit residential mobility which in turns leads t o segregated schools. We investigate this drawing on data from millions of residential parcels in America’s 25 largest metro areas. Examining changes in school attendance zone boundaries, we are able to isolate the causal effect of a change in the built environment of a school’s catchment area on that school’s racial composition. These findings help illuminate how land use policy influences educational segregation and contributes to literature on how policies that regulate the built environment affect racial sorting.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Fall Semester 2025
09/09/2025
Erik Kimbrough, Chapman University
“Partisan Norms and Polarization in the 2024 Presidential Election”
Taking a norms perspective on the formation and evolution of public opinion allows us to capture both sides of a process of mutual influence. Group norms emerge via coordination of individual beliefs, and individual beliefs are shaped by pressure to conform to group norms. This paper examines these dynamics before and after the 2024 presidential election, for 5 question batteries capturing different dimensions of political attitudes (issues, civility, democratic practices, news sources, and facts). We document (1) striking stability of norms and beliefs, except on a few highly salient issues, (2) evidence that partisans often know what they “ought” to believe, even if they don’t always fall in line, (3) that priming group norms increases conformity, (4) that nudging accurate factual beliefs does not improve accuracy, and (5) that partisan norms about which news sources one ought to trust have real impact on the extent to which information causes beliefs to update in the correct direction.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
09/16/2025
Ben Noble, University of California, San Diego
“Are Voters’ Preferences Being Ignored by Governor’s Agendas? ”
Co-partisan governors increasingly pursue similar agendas, and partisan control of government highly predicts government policy. Some attribute these trends to elite coordination at the expense of constituency preferences. We argue these accounts ignore the role of voters. Governors have incentives to represent constituency preferences; and partisan agendas may simply mirror governors’ nationalized and polarized electorates. We measure the partisanship of nearly 2,500 State of the State Addresses (1962–2023) to evaluate whether governors’ agendas are reflective of differences in constituents’ preferences. We fine-tune a series of BERT models to predict the party of each held-out speech using other governors’ addresses as training data. When a governor “sounds like” her co-partisans, the model more confidently predicts her party. We use this predicted probability as a measure of expressed partisanship and show that gubernatorial agendas have polarized, but this trend is increasingly correlated with constituency partisanship, not governor partisanship. Polarization in gubernatorial agendas has increased, but this shift reflects voter preferences rather than a departure from them
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
09/23/2025
Patrick James, University of Southern California
“The Visual International Relations Project”
The Visual International Relations Project (VIRP), based on the systemist method, creates graphic representations of analytical arguments from academic publications. The systemist approach emphasizes theoretical completeness and logical consistency, which points toward the use of standardized visualizations to complement analysis conveyed in words. The VIRP archive contains over 1000 diagrams that summarize the contents of respective academic publications. The systemist graphic technique also can be used to depict the unfolding of events in real time. A diagram conveying the events of a major contemporary international conflict will be used to show the academic policy-related value of the systemist graphic approach in application.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
09/30/2025
Alex Zhao, University of California, San Diego
“The Indigenous American Voter: Evidence from the Political Geography of the Navajo Nation”
What drives Indigenous American vote choice? Indigenous Americans occupy a unique position in America as citizens of both the United States and their own sovereign nations. While research has explored why many Indigenous voters support the Democratic party in federal elections, far less is known about what shapes political behavior within Indigenous politics. This article argues Indigenous politics is distinct and structured by debates over how tribal sovereignty is exercised between engaging with external actors or maintaining autonomy through political independence. To test this argument, I focus on the largest tribal sovereign in the country, the Navajo Nation, through an original individual-level survey and two decades of chapter-level election returns to assess how Navajo voters support competing theories of vote choice in US and Indigenous elections. This study demonstrates how Indigenous voters prioritize their self-determination when engaging with politics and offers a framework to understanding Indigenous political behavior as distinct.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/07/2025
Nathan Chan, Loyola Marymount University
“Racial Invisibility in American Public Opinion”
A long line of research in American politics finds that racial attitudes influence American public opinion. We extend this foundational literature by elaborating on a new dimension of such attitudes that moves beyond the traditional focus on racial animus. We present a theory of racial invisibility: the extent to which individuals perceive that racial groups are irrelevant to the social and civic life of the U.S. Applied to Asian Americans, a group that we suggest is affected by this dimension of racial attitudes, we argue that racial invisibility shapes Americans’ political attitudes. In two original surveys, we present and validate a new measure of racial invisibility. We then demonstrate that invisibility of Asian Americans is associated with more conservative attitudes on racialized policies such as immigration, hostility toward Asian American presidential candidates, and more support for Republican politicians, after controlling for traditional measures of racial antipathy like racial resentment and anti-Asian animus. Next, in an experimental study, we demonstrate that making Asian Americans more visible to respondents in treatment conditions shifts similar policy preferences and views toward government officials. We conclude by noting the relevance of this overlooked aspect of racial attitudes, racial invisibility, in the American politics and racial/ethnic politics literatures.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/14/2025
Ali Fisunoglu, Saint Louis University
“Refugees, State Capacity, and Social Strain”
This study explores the impact of major demographic movements, particularly refugee flows, on local dynamics. It examines their influence on unemployment and crime rates, and evaluates the role of state capacity in moderating these effects. Through an analysis of Turkey’s experience with the Syrian refugee crisis, the study develops a framework suggesting that refugee influxes can generate social strain, but stronger institutions can provide a buffer. The empirical analysis, using sub-national data, shows that refugee flows have a limited impact on unemployment and that their effect on crime is primarily confined to provinces with the lowest levels of state capacity. The interaction between refugee presence and state capacity is negative, indicating that capable provincial administrations can more effectively absorb demographic shocks. These findings highlight the importance of state capacity as a crucial factor in facilitating successful refugee integration and the preservation of social cohesion, providing broader insights for policymakers and scholars concerned with migration, security, and governance.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/21/2025
Haibo Liu, Keck Graduate Institute
“Motivational Spillovers from Meaningful Experiences in Repeated Tasks: Evidence from Critical 9-1-1 Calls”
Professional employees frequently engage in repeated tasks that vary in experienced meaningfulness. This paper examines how a meaningful task experience spills over to affect subsequent performance when a task is next repeated. Specifically, we investigate how exposure to an acute 9-1-1 emergency call impacts the performance of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crews on subsequent calls. Leveraging a dataset of over 57 million 9-1-1 calls across the United States and exploiting the quasi-random assignment of call types to EMS crews, we find that response times improve by 2.4–2.8% following a life-threatening emergency compared to a routine call. This motivational spillover effect is transient, dissipating after four hours, and is most pronounced when prior exposure to acute calls has been infrequent, with effect sizes ranging from 6.8–12.6%. We find this effect diminishes with crew fatigue. Robustness checks cast doubt on adrenaline or heightened salience as alternative explanations, while supplemental interview evidence supports meaningful experiences as the mechanism arising from reduced discrepancies between job expectations and reality. Our findings highlight the role of job expectation-reality gaps in sustaining motivation and performance among professional workers in intrinsically motivated jobs. These insights underscore the strategic importance of allocating meaningful tasks throughout the workday to enhance employee motivation and efficiency.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/28/2025
Deepak Premkumar, Public Policy Institute of California
“What Happened When California Suspended Bail”
The efficacy and fairness of cash bail in promoting public safety has been a prominent policy question in recent years, but it is difficult to rigorously estimate the effects of bail, particularly at the state level, because of a lack of exogenous variation. California responded to the COVID pandemic by setting bail at zero dollars for many misdemeanors and felonies, increasing the number of people who were immediately released after being arrested. Until July 2022, most Californians lived in a county with an emergency bail order in place. We separately estimate the impact of the implementation and revocation of these zero-bail orders on rearrests using a triple difference framework that relies on the staggered timing across counties and uses offenses that did not qualify for zero bail as a control group. The implementation of emergency bail orders significantly increased the likelihood and number of rearrests within 30 days of the initial arrest. The increase in rearrests was driven by felony offenses, but we find no evidence of an increase for violent felonies, a concern raised by some observers. For the counties that had an emergency bail order for at least a year, there was a statistically significant increase on rearrests initially, but the effect diminished over time. The average effect over the first year of implementation in these counties was not statistically significant. Notably, the rise in felony rearrests did not subside for these counties that extended an emergency order past 2020. Though the initiation of emergency bail orders led to increases in rearrests, lifting these orders had no significant effect on rearrests, regardless of offense type.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
11/04/2025
Evan Rosenman and Sarah Cannon, Claremont McKenna College
” A Statistical Study of Alternative Representational Systems for the LA City Council”
Los Angeles is currently convening a Charter Reform Commission to consider alternative methods for selecting its leaders. Key recommendations include expanding the City Council, changing the functioning of primaries, and adopting alternative electoral systems such as multimember districts and ranked-choice voting.
In this project, we provide a rigorous, data-driven approach to evaluate these proposals, focusing on their effects on proportionality, racial representation, and electoral responsiveness. We draw on techniques from both Statistics and Computer Science, including Bayesian ethnicity imputation, ecological inference, and modern graph sampling algorithms for exploring the space of district boundaries. Our hybrid approach enables deeper insights into the political geography of Los Angeles, and the challenges in establishing a fair and representative City Council. By providing empirical evidence on the strengths and weaknesses of various districting systems, our work aims to inform policymaking and advance democratic representation in Los Angeles.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
11/11/2025
Joshua Tasoff, Claremont Graduate University
“What do people think about?”
Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. We systematically measure human thoughts through randomized daily surveys (i.e., the experience sampling method) in which subjects project their conscious experiences into natural language, and report their thoughts’ content, perceived cause, and concurrent activity (raw text and categorical variables). The data set, which is intended to be like a census of human thoughts, reveals essential patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. We find that a surprisingly large fraction of thoughts are self-reported as intrusive, and these unwanted thoughts are characteristically related to anger, anxiety, sadness, illness, guilt, and shame. Understanding thoughts matters because thoughts are strongly predictive of people’s subjective wellbeing (SWB). SWB is increasing in the intentionality of the thought and also strongly associated with thought content. Thoughts explain substantially more of SWB than what people are doing (activity), demographics, or socio-economic status. In particular, the actual text of people’s thoughts and activities explains 7-8× more of the variation than traditional categorical variables and thus merits greater attention.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
11/18/2025
Cesar Vargas Nunez, Claremont McKenna College
“Americans of both parties prioritize the deportation of unauthorized immigrants with criminal history”
While the removal of unauthorized immigrants was a central promise of President Trump’s 2024 campaign, public attitudes toward deportation remain underexplored. Which unauthorized immigrants do Americans believe should be deported? To examine this, we conducted a preregistered conjoint survey experiment using a sample matched to Census quotas. Respondents evaluated pairs of hypothetical unauthorized immigrants varying in key traits and chose which one should be prioritized for deportation. We find that both Democrats and Republicans agree that unauthorized immigrants with criminal records should be deported first. Other traits—like community contributions, time in the United States, and social ties—have smaller but still substantive effects. We adjudicate our finding of bipartisan consensus with the partisan divide in support for mass deportation by pointing to partisan differences in beliefs about unauthorized immigrants’ criminality. By shifting focus to public opinion on deportation, this study offers new insights into a key political debate.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
12/02/2025
Kimberly Renk, University of California, San Diego
“Rulers, Resistance, and Refuge: The Historical Political Economy of Extraction”
Throughout history, rulers subjected peasants to heavy taxation and forced labor, yet they seldom rebelled. I address this puzzle by building on an observation largely overlooked in the study of autocratic extraction: rather than rebel, peasants often preferred to flee. To understand the implications of this phenomenon, I develop a formal model that reveals a reciprocal relationship between a weak ruler’s chosen tax level and peasants’ decision to flee: while the threat of excessive flight constrains taxation, the ruler counterintuitively demands a tax that drives some peasants to flee—reflecting his ability to extract more from those who remain. These dual effects find support in colonial Peru, where historical and geospatial data demonstrate that the Spanish Crown set lower tribute rates in places where indigenous peasants could more readily flee. Moreover, a difference-in-differences design provides evidence that the Crown’s imposition of forced labor in mines provoked sustained outmigration. These findings underscore tax-induced migration as a structural feature of weak autocracies.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Spring Semester 2025
02/04/2025
Michael J. Pomante II, Claremont Graduate University
“The Cost of Voting: How State Laws Shape Electoral Access and Participation”
Dr. Pomante’s presentation delves into the Cost of Voting Index (COVI) to examine how state election laws shape voter access and participation in the United States. By analyzing changes in legislation over time, it highlights disparities in voting accessibility across states and explores the impact of restrictive and inclusive policies. Particular attention is given to California’s significant progress in improving voting accessibility, illustrating how states can enact reforms to enhance voter participation. The presentation underscores the broader implications of these laws for democracy and emphasizes the importance of evidence-based reforms to promote an inclusive and equitable electoral system.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/11/2025
Michelle Torres, University of California, Los Angeles
“Beyond Prediction: Identifying Latent Treatments in Images”
Images are a rich and crucial element of political communication. The complexity of the information they convey creates challenges for the identification, interpretation, and explanation of the effects of visual messages on information processing and attitude formation. In this article, we adapt a methodological approach used in text analysis, the supervised Indian Buffet Process (sIBP) developed by Fong and Grimmer (F&G, 2016, 2021), to identify latent treatments in images and evaluate their impact on outcomes of interest. First, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to decompose images into substantively meaningful and interpretable tokens, visual words, to then form the input of the sIBP. Then, we follow the framework introduced by F&G and demonstrate the utility of this approach using two datasets: 1) a novel experiment measuring attitudes towards climate change in response to visual frames and 2) images of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protests manually labeled by human coders according to the level of conflict they depict. We find significant differences between demographic and political groups in the way they perceive images, and also unmask latent treatments that confound the relationship between our treatment and outcomes of interest. Importantly, this paper extends the usage of computer vision tools in social sciences beyond prediction of image labels to uncovering, understanding, and visualizing the features of images that produce outcomes.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/18/2025
Jacek Kugler, Claremont Graduate University
“Generalized Power Transition”
Outline recent work that uses conditional anarchy assumptions to join realist and liberal arguments into a single unified model of international interactions.
Novel deductions indicate that power preponderance rather than Disarmament, Balance of Power or Mutual Assured Destruction preserves stability. Supra national integration that preserves international peace requires mutual trust that emerges when nations adopt post-materialist, secular and democratic values. Otherwise transactional interactions and collusion dominate interactions. Will apply this new general perspective to explore the China-USA, Israel-Palestine and the Russia-Ukraine crises
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/25/2025
Paul Zak, Claremont Graduate University
“Changing Attitudes and Behaviors for Difficult Issues”
It is generally difficult to change people’s views on strongly-held issues like race relations, political preferences, and support for economic freedom. But, it is not impossible. By measuring brain responses, this talk will show how high Immersion videos change attitudes and behaviors. These findings are confirmed by pharmaceutical interventions. I will also show you why President Trump was re-elected.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
03/04/2025
Beatrice Magistro, California Institute of Technology
“Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Globalization: Common Microfoundations and Political Implications”
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping labor markets and sparking political debates. Like economic globalization, AI developments promise benefits, including job creation and lower prices, but also costs such as job displacement, raising crucial questions about public perception. Will AI, like globalization, challenge existing paradigms and trigger a backlash? Leveraging a conjoint experiment with 6,000 respondents from the US and Canada, we examine public opinion toward offshoring and generative AI, focusing on the multidimensional trade-offs between job and price changes. Across all scenarios, respondents are equally or more sensitive to price changes than employment shifts. AI is favored over offshoring, especially among Democrats, highlighting an emerging partisan divide in the US. Republicans and Canadians show more varied support, indicating AI is not immune to opposition. By focusing on the microfoundations of opinion formation, we identify scenarios that may trigger or temper protectionist stances.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/11/2025
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, University of California, Los Angeles
“Batting the Beehive or Nipping the Bud? Deadly Repression \& Protest Cycle Intensity in African Societies”
Why do protesters react differently to deadly repression in different contexts? In this piece, we propose a new mechanism to elucidate the repression-dissent puzzle in the case of deadly repression: the protest cycle mechanism. The general intuition of this mechanism is that individuals react differently to deadly repression (by organizing more versus less protests), depending on the sequence of events that preceded the instance of deadly repression at time $t-n$ days. This mainly implies that events taking place at time $t-n$ days matter for the way individuals react to deadly repression at time $t$–such as, amongst others, the amount of deadly repression, how spread apart they are, the intensity already achieved by the protest cycle, the existence and intensity of previous protest cycles on the same issue, and deadliness of repression against them. This opportunity structure calculus is, we argue, compounded by the structures under which the violence takes place–the nature and conditions of the state and society where the violence takes place. To test this theory we introduce a novel, richer measure of protest cycle intensity in this paper, which we elaborate in relation to time-series cross-section data from the Armed Conflict Location \& Event Data Project (ACLED). We test our theory using data from 54 African societies between January 1st 2000 and December 31st 2022, from which we devise measures of protest cycles and protest issues.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/25/2025
Lincoln Land Fellows
Daniel Talamantes, Claremont Graduate University
“Zones of Sovereignty: Environmental Justice, Land Policy, and Community Empowerment in Puente Valley“
My graduate research focuses on environmental and social justice in the La Puente Valley region of Los Angeles, CA, examining cultural sovereignty and the disproportionate pollution burden faced by communities of color. Centered around the City of Industry, the research employs ground truth methods, ethnography, and sampling to assess air, soil, and water quality issues. Collaborating with grassroots organizations like Avocado Heights Vaquer@s and the Clean Air Coalition, the project aims to ensure their voices are central in defending their homes.The research relevant to the fund will examine La Puente Valley’s unique status as an unincorporated community, its status as a green zone, and the impacts of LA County’s recent General Plan Land Use Plan. This grassroots engagement aims to highlight the importance of ensuring that land policies are responsive to the needs and concerns of the communities they impact.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/01/2025
Kyungkook Kang, Claremont Graduate University
“Arithmetic of World Politics: Evaluating Great Power Transitions, 1980–2029”
Debates surrounding power transitions among the U.S., China, and India reveal the complexities of international relations and highlight the need for reliable methods to measure national power. This talk examines the evolving metrics used to quantify national power, critically assessing their validity and effectiveness. It identifies the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) as a flawed measure and argues that GDP adjusted for Absolute Political Capacity (APC) offers a more accurate reflection of global power dynamics since 1980. The analysis also projects significant shifts in global power over the next 25 years, with China closing the gap with the U.S. and India achieving rapid growth. Emphasizing the importance of robust, replicable power metrics, this study provides valuable insights into the implications of power transitions for global security and cooperation.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/08/2025
Ian Krajbich, University of California, Los Angeles
“Memory Constrains Everyday Decision-making“
Our cognitive abilities constrain our ability to make good decisions. In this talk I’ll discuss two papers on how decision-making is affected by our limited memory. In the first paper, I’ll discuss “open-ended” decisions, i.e., decisions that occur without explicit menus, requiring people to generate options from memory. Here we investigated how memory salience, subjective value, and time constraints influence such decisions. We conducted a two-part experiment where subjects told us their favorite item for each of 30 categories, then later recalled options in each category and rated those recalled items. We developed and compared two sequential sampling models for the “favorite item” choices, one a search-then-decide model and the other a decide-while-searching model. Our findings reveal that memory and value play critical roles in memory-based decisions, with time pressure putting more emphasis on memory and less on value, which we attribute to a decide-while-searching model. In the second paper, I’ll discuss learning in settings when actions produce multiple outcomes that unfold over time. Here, we used behavioral and eye-tracking experiments to study how people learn when their choices yield both immediate and delayed reward information. Our subjects overweighted the immediate reward information compared to the delayed information. Moreover, this bias increased over the course of the experiments. The eye-tracking data indicate that our subjects spent more time looking at immediate vs. delayed rewards, though across subjects, the relative dwell proportion did not predict the behavioral bias. Our results indicate that people prioritize not just immediate rewards, but immediate reward information. Unlike temporal discounting, this form of impatience is a clear mistake and leads to objectively worse outcomes. Together, these two papers indicate that limited memory is crucial to account for in a variety of common decision-making problems.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
04/15/2025
Alma Bezares Calderon, Pitzer College
“Exploring Preferences for Natural Resource Governance: Experimental Evidence from Mail and Niger”
Governance, environmental degradation, and conflict are deeply intertwined issues that can significantly disrupt the lives and livelihoods of people, particularly in fragile and resource-constrained settings. Despite this interconnection, there remains a gap in empirical research examining how these factors influence one another. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the impact of community-driven versus centralized natural resource governance on resilience and conflict over these resources. We conducted a survey experiment as part of the baseline survey of an extensive program in communities exposed to high levels of conflict in Niger and Mali to explore how various identity characteristics affect the confidence of individuals and their attitudes toward climate-related conflict resolution, institutional trust, and resilience to climate shocks. The study features two treatment groups. One arm exposed participants to information about community-based natural resource governance systems, while the other arm introduced content on centralized, government-led natural resource governance systems. We also included a control group that does not specify how natural resource systems are managed but uses the locally used system.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/22/2025
Hanzhang Liu, Pitzer College
“Trusting a Government without Women? Lack of Gender Representation and Political Trust under Authoritarianism”
This study examines how the absence of gender representation affects public trust in authoritarian governments. Using a survey experiment in China, we assess how citizens respond to the lack of female leadership and identify the political legitimacy channels through which such underrepresentation matters. We find that highlighting the performance-related and gender equality-based consequences of women’s exclusion significantly reduces political trust, especially among regime “outsiders” such as rural residents, non-party members, and those with lower socioeconomic status. In contrast, appeals to ideology or international standing show no such effect. These findings suggest that, in authoritarian contexts, citizens interpret descriptive representation instrumentally—valuing it for its perceived contribution to effective governance and fairness, rather than for symbolic or ideological reasons. This study contributes to the literature on authoritarian legitimation and gender politics by showing that the absence of representation can meaningfully erode regime support, particularly when it undermines core expectations of performance and social equity.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/29/2025
Nicholas Brouwer, University of California, Merced
“American Indian Political Institutions and Economic Development”
The importance of political institutions to the economic development of American Indian communities has been frequently discussed in the 21st Century, but very little work has been done to quantify and examine this relationship. In this project, I fill this gap by examining key native constitutionally-defined institutions to observe how these institutions relate to the economic development on American Indian reservations. In particular, I look at how the separation of powers and spatial distribution of the tribe impact the development of reservation land. Additionally, this project is the first to quantify the effects of American Indian self-determination policy by analyzing which tribes participate in self-governance programs with the federal government and how their participation generates economic benefits.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Fall Semester 2024
09/10/2024(Canceled)
Ian Krajbich, University of California, Los Angeles
“Hesitation in the Marketplace”
A standard assumption in game theory is that decision makers have pre-planned strategies telling them what actions to take for every contingency. In contrast, non-strategic decisions often involve an on-the-spot comparison process, with longer response times (RT) for choices between more similarly appealing options. If strategic decisions also exhibit these patterns, then RT might betray private information and alter game theory predictions. Here, we examined bargaining behavior to determine whether RT reveals private information in strategic settings. Using pre-existing and experimental data from eBay, we show that both buyers and sellers take hours longer to accept bad offers and to reject good offers. We find nearly identical patterns in the two datasets, indicating a causal effect of offer size on RT. However, this relationship is half as strong for rejections as for acceptances, reducing the amount of useful private information revealed by the sellers. Counter to our predictions, buyers are discouraged by slow rejections – they are less likely to counteroffer with slow sellers. We also show that a drift diffusion model (DDM), traditionally limited to decisions on the order of seconds, can account for decisions on the order of hours, sometimes days. The DDM reveals that more experienced sellers are less cautious and more inclined to accept offers. In summary, strategic decisions are inconsistent with pre-planned strategies over actions. This underscores the need for game theory to incorporate RT as a strategic variable and broadens the applicability of the DDM to slow decisions.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
09/17/2024
Luwei Ying, University of California, Los Angeles
“Military Power and Ideological Appeals of Religious Extremists”
The proliferation of terrorist propaganda threatens societies worldwide. Yet, we know little about violent extremists’ strategy in disseminating their ideologies. This paper studies the ideological appeals of jihadi groups, among the most prominent contemporary conflict movements, and shows how these groups navigate between religious and secular narratives in response to the fluctuations in their military power. Weaker groups must prioritize their core believers and foreground a more radical religious ideal, while stronger groups seek broader support from more moderate individuals and thus pitch themselves more secularly. I illustrate this dynamic with an original database of 87 magazines published regularly by 35 jihadi groups from 1984 to 2019. Further, I leverage approximately 6 million tweets from 21,000 ISIS-related accounts in 2015 to examine the jihadists’ mobilization efforts regarding different audiences. Overall, I demonstrate that violent groups put more emphasis on their ideological brand when they are militarily weaker.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
09/24/2024
Joshua Ferrer, University of California, Los Angeles
“To Elect or Appoint? Evidence from Local Election Administration”
Do elected or appointed officials produce better outcomes for their constituents? Elections should improve representation by providing a direct link to voters. However, some argue that citizens may have too little information to select good leaders and hold them accountable, especially at the local level. To assess these conflicting claims, he examines the performance of local election officials, an office which has come under immense strain to deliver democratic elections and for which selection method is a live policy debate. Using an exhaustive original collection of election administration structures in 1,116 counties across 13 states and over 62 years, he leverages changes in selection method over time to credibly measure differences in the election outcomes produced by local election officials based on whether they were elected or appointed.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/01/24
Adam Eckerd, Old Dominion University
“Policy Formulation for Wicked Problems: Mental Model Convergence and Policy Windows”
Complex problems are not easily amenable to simple policy solutions. However, the complexity itself is a human construct. For policy formulation purposes, the exact nature of the complexity is secondary to the human cognition of it. The policy problem of a complex issue is often not the natural complexity but is rather the human interpretation and understanding of the complexity. Individuals are likely to understand a problem through a unique combination of social influences, individual experiences and biases, and actual information. The complexity and wickedness of climate change relate to the social implications and human interpretations of those implications. If we view the issue of climate change as a human issue, it is fundamentally a symptom (or side effect) of modernity and any carbon-reduction solution would likely reorient modernity. The individual interpretation of climate change, then, is likely related to an individual’s perception of modernity. A critic of modernity may see anthropologic hubris facing a reconciliation. A technocrat may hold out hope on an engineering or technological solution. A modernist may be so confident in modernity’s ability to solve pressing problems that they see no cause for action or alarm.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/08/24
Deepti Goel, Pitzer College
“Teacher Quality in Delhi’s Higher Secondary Public Schools”
We measure teacher quality in terms of their effectiveness in raising student test scores in a high-stakes examination. Using a single cohort of grade 12 students from Delhi, we present the first ever value-added estimates of teacher quality from the public schooling system in India. We find that changing teacher assignment within schools has a modest impact on test scores: being assigned a one standard deviation better teacher from the same school would move a median student to the 56th percentile. We also find that specific personality traits of teachers are better predictors of their quality than are characteristics rewarded in the status quo, such as educational qualifications, training, and experience. Finally, we examine whether principals’ subjective ratings of teachers correlate with value-added estimates of teacher quality, and do not find any such correlation. Informed by our findings, and the existing literature on teacher evaluation, we recommend a new system for assessing teachers that is based on a multiplicity of methods, including value-added estimates and principal ratings.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/15/24
Jack Stecher, University of Alberta
“The Use of Disclosure Volume to Affect Shareholder Voting”
This talk investigates whether a sender of information can manipulate the outcome of a majority vote, even if all the information she promises is completely unbiased. We are in particular interested in the case in which information is costly for voters to process, even if the cost is arbitrarily small. To that end, we model a sender, thought of as a manager, whose goal is for a resolution to pass at an upcoming shareholders’ meeting. The sender has no private information, and makes only one decision: how many unbiased signals about the resolution’s likely outcome does she promise to have released. She cannot inspect the signals and screen them before their release, or otherwise manipulate what the voters can observe. Nevertheless, we show that her choice of disclosure volume can increase the probability that the voters pass the resolution. The reason is that in equilibrium, the voters cannot observe all the signals or coordinate on what they observe, but instead they must sample incompletely and independently. By choosing the number of available signals, the sender affects the voters’ optimal sample size and their inferences about what other voters must have observed in order to make their votes pivotal
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
10/22/24
Kevin Grieco,University of California, Los Angeles
“Building Fiscal Capacity with Traditional Political Institutions: Experimental and Qualitative Evidence from Sierra Leone”
How can weak states build fiscal capacity? I argue that governments in weak states can build fiscal capacity by collaborating with non-state, traditional political institutions (TPIs). To study the impact of collaboration, I partnered with the local government in Kono District, Sierra Leone (the KDC), and embedded an experiment within their awareness campaign for a new rural property tax. Property owners in 118 villages were shown videos with varying content. Those in the treatment group viewed an additional segment where their paramount chief discussed the collaboration between the chiefdom government and the KDC in the tax effort. Priming collaboration significantly increased tax compliance and strengthened property owners’ belief in their obligation to pay taxes. To assess mechanisms, I developed additional video segments where paramount chiefs emphasized either their coercive capacity or their accountability to constituents. The experimental findings, reinforced by qualitative evidence from 300 interviews, demonstrate that both coercion and accountability are crucial sources of TPIs’ authority.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
10/29/24
Stephen Goggoin, San Diego State University
“Building Fiscal Capacity with Traditional Political Institutions: Experimental and Qualitative Evidence from Sierra Leone”
The long literature on “ownership” of issues (and traits) by political parties has been plagued by measurement issues related to exactly how voters cognitively represent these associations. Specifically, do voters of all partisan backgrounds hold these associations? Do they make inferences about candidates because of their party label? Most explanations for ownership typically revolve around assessments of competency of the political parties, while revisionist accounts have noted the role of partisan priorities in shaping these associations. We add a third explanation: voters may simply share issue preferences with the party. Using a question-wording experiment with 40 salient issues in American politics in which respondents are asked to assess the competency of the parties, their preferences between the parties, and beliefs about which party prioritizes the issue, we help settle these competing explanations as the source of ownership. We find important differences across question-wording and issues, as well as strong effects of respondent partisanship and issue preferences, calling into question the validity and usefulness of typical ownership measures. These findings have important implications for candidate and party messaging as well as the interpretation of issue preferences in polls in today’s polarized environment.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
11/05/24
Yuzhu Zeng, La Sierra University
“Demographic Shifts and Eurasian Integration”
Our recent work has unveiled a paradigm shift in our understanding of global stability. Contrary to previous expectations and established narratives, a balance of power does not necessarily lead to stability. Instead, a preponderance of power among satisfied contenders emerges as the key to long-term regional and global stability. This Power Transition perspective, validated over time, raises concerns about the next half-century as several power transitions will set the preconditions for potential regional and global conflicts. Post World War II, the United States forged a formidable NATO coalition with European nations, ensuring peace. Today, China is mounting a challenge to the United States, vying for dominance. In the Asian context, India also looms as a potential threat to China, which could lead to a clash over unresolved regional issues. Simultaneously, the integration process within the EU stands as a beacon of hope, showing that nations can cooperate to build larger unified unions that secure their members. This integration process is being mirrored globally, and a dominant global or regional Union could emerge, potentially averting conflicts. This paper delves into the potential benefits of aggregating key global competitors, offering a beacon of hope for a more stable future.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
11/12/24
Melissa Rogers and Edward Headington, Claremont Graduate University
“Criminal Justice Encounters and Political Participation in Native Communities”
A robust line of scholarly research has shown that encounters with the criminal justice system make individuals less likely to participate in politics. Much of this research has focused on negative interactions between Black Americans and police. In this research, we examine the relationship between criminal justice encounters and political participation for Native Americans. Native Americans have very high rates of incarceration and frequent criminal justice encounters, suggesting that they might also see political participation dampened. Bad experiences with tribal police are also likely to reduce participation in tribal elections, but less than in non-tribal elections. We supplement these findings with descriptive evidence that many Native Americans, like many Black Americans, consider themselves targets of discriminatory policing. This talk will discuss the research process and the research context and provided preliminary results.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
11/19/24
Lincoln Land Fellows
Sasha Geschwind and Jessica Geiger
“Effectiveness of Municipal Collaboration for Watershed Management in the Southern Colorado River Basin”
As climate change increasingly puts pressure on water resources, it is more important than ever that they be managed effectively. This presentation covers research on municipal stormwater permits under the EPA NPDES MS4 Phase 1 system (Environmental Protection Agency, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) examining the effect of collaboration types amongst municipalities in order to reach their stormwater goals, as measured by their stormwater runoff and water samples across the southern Colorado River Basin from 2010-2020. This research uses common pool resource management theory and the themes of scale to identify the most effective approach for municipal management of watersheds.
“Building the Hell Out of This Place: An Environmental Justice Perspective on the IE’s Warehouse Boom”
In the 1980s, the Inland Empire (IE) was a rural agricultural area, with Ontario dominated by orange groves and dairy farms. As farms moved to cheaper land in the Central Valley, they left behind toxic waste for local communities to manage. City officials, like Ontario’s planning director Jerry Blum, saw the land as a “brownfield” ripe for development and welcomed warehouses, hoping for economic gains. However, these warehouses are unevenly distributed, with evidence suggesting they are often placed in communities of color. A 2021 study by Quan Yuan shows race, not income, predicts warehouse locations. Building on this, our research uses data from WarehouseCITY, the U.S. Census, and CalEnviroScreen 4.0 to analyze how historical demographics influence warehouse placement and assess associated health impacts.
12/03/24
Brian Palmer, University of Southern California
“Social Capital and Export Agriculture in Mexico: Evidence from a Survey Experiment”
When do commodity booms offer widespread economic opportunity? Over the past two decades, Mexican exports of high-value agricultural commodities such as avocados, berries, and agave have expanded rapidly. This project analyzes the conditions under which small-scale farmers are positioned to participate in these dynamic export markets. Using a survey experiment conducted in Mexico, I analyze the effect that social capital—formal and informal ties that farmers form with other members of their communities—has on economic adaptation from traditional to non-traditional commodities (i.e. from corn to berries). Ethnographic field research in berry-growing regions uncovers the mechanisms through which social capital aids in three stages of economic adaptation: innovation, resource deployment, and community governance.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Spring Semester 2024
01/30/2024
Akhilesh Srivastava, La Sierra University
India is swiftly advancing towards its bold goal of evolving into a developed nation with a USD 30 trillion economy by its centennial year of independence, encapsulated in the Vision India@2047 plan. Spearheaded by Mr. Akhilesh Srivastava, the two-year initiative focuses on making India a global innovation and technology leader, with an emphasis on human development, social welfare, and environmental sustainability. The vision includes achieving a robust economy with a high per-capita income, supported by strong public finances and a financial sector, alongside developing top-notch infrastructure. It aims to reduce government interference, enhance digital governance, and foster global champions in various sectors, including becoming self-reliant in defense and space. Environmental goals include boosting renewable energy and reducing emissions, while also empowering youth through education and increasing employment opportunities. The plan also seeks to forge international R&D partnerships to establish leading labs and elevate Indian institutions to global acclaim.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Government
02/06/2024
Cesi Cruz, UCLA
“Campaigning Against Populism: Emotions and Information in Real Election Campaigns”
Across the world, populist politicians have been winning elections using new forms of campaigning to reach citizens directly, often using emotional rather than policy-based appeals. The challenge for mainstream parties has been how to articulate policy platforms and campaign promises in this new context. In particular, do forms of campaigning used by populist politicians — direct outreach and emotional messaging — work for programmatic politicians as well? We partner with a mainstream opposition political party in the Philippines to implement a field experiment during the 2019 Senate election to explore the effectiveness of: (i) direct appeals in the form of door-to-door visits providing information about their platform; (ii) the addition of positive emotional appeals in mediating this information. We show that direct engagement with voters to deliver policy messaging works in both forms, even when facing a popular populist incumbent. We also show that while the additional emotional messaging fosters increased engagement with the campaign in the short term, the policy information-only treatment was more relevant in driving vote choice. Last, we present evidence that the treatments operated through a persuasion channel, as treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain about their knowledge, and gave higher ratings to the party’s quality and proposed policies.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Government
02/13/2024
Brian Yates, American University
“Evaluating Resources Used and Monetary as well as Nonmonetary Outcomes of Biopsychosocial Interventions: Toward Delivering the Best to the Most for the Least”
Insights that cost-inclusive evaluation (CIE) generates for evaluators and researchers are illustrated with 50 years of work in health and human services, including child, parent, and adolescent interventions, computer-based drug abuse treatment, consumer-operated mental health services, randomized clinical trials for suicide prevention, and emergency assistance programs for human rights defenders. CIE attempts to understand relationships between program costs and monetary as well as nonmonetary outcomes. CIE works best if conducted using multiple interest group perspectives to collect and analyze data from individual participants for competing interventions and counterfactuals. Common forms of economic evaluation, including cost-effectiveness and cost benefit analyses, can be most helpful if they go beyond quantifying cost-outcome relationships to understanding resource → activity, activity → process, and process → outcome relationships. Accessible graphic methods of portraying these relationships may encourage engagement of participants, providers, and community members in evaluation and research
Host: Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences/Politics & Government
02/20/2024
Birol Yesilada, Portland State University
“What Can Societal Values say about the Consolidation of Democracy?”
The relationship between economic development, cultural change, and political liberalization is often explored through classic modernization theory. Recent scholarship attempts to extend the classic approach to be more closely aligned with empirical reality. From the human development perspective, economic prosperity acts as a catalyst for cultural development, leading to social values that favor liberalization and thus promote effective democracy. However, recent works point out that fundamental differences exist in how materials and post-materials societies and their respective values along the traditional and secular dimensions affect the consolidation of democracy. In other words, how people practice religion remains a constant that plays a vital role in HD dynamics and democratic development and could explain, in part, why some societies fare better than others in the consolidation of their democracies.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
02/27/2024
Claire Adida, UCSD
“When hearts meet minds; Complementary effects of perspective-getting and information on refugee inclusion.“
Perspective-getting and correcting misconceptions are common interventions to promote inclusion toward outgroups. However, each strategy has limitations. Information corrections yield ambiguous effects, and empathy-based interventions may reproduce the biases they are meant to alleviate. We develop a theoretical framework that clarifies the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy, and offer a design to identify the conditions under which they are most effective. Using three studies on refugee inclusion with nearly 15,000 Americans over three years, we find that information and perspective-getting affect different outcomes. Perspective-getting affects warmth, policy preferences, and behavior, while information leads to factual updating only. We show that combining both interventions produces an additive effect on all outcomes, that neither strategy enhances the other, but that bundling the strategies may prevent backfire effects of information. Our results underscore the promise and limits of information and perspective-getting for promoting inclusion, highlighting the benefits of integrating the two strategies.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/05/2024
Pablo Argote, University of Southern California
“Education Under Authoritarian Rule: Evidence from the Chilean 1973 Coup”
Educational systems and curricula can serve as powerful tools for authoritarian governments to mold the political attitudes of young people. Does the legacy of education under authoritarian rule persist after the regime itself has ended? We exploit a discrete change in the school curriculum, generated by the Chilean 1973 coup that overthrew President Allende, and installed General Pinochet in power. After the coup, the junta radically changed the contents of the curriculum, forbidding any “leftist” content, among other measures. We use a regression discontinuity design that compares people who were barely exposed to this new curriculum to those whose education had ended before the reform. Our preliminary results indicate that being educated under the junta-controlled education system had a lasting impact; we find a negative effect on left self-identification and a null effect on both right-wing and centrist self-identification. In this sense, we corroborate that anti-Marxist indoctrination was somewhat successful, as we observe the effects spanning decades and transcending the dictatorship itself.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/19/2024
Heather Campbell, Claremont Graduate University
“Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice: A Complexity Approach”
With segregation in housing markets a recurring problem in the US, communities populated predominantly by racial and ethnic minorities in the US have tended to be the locations for disproportionately more disamenities and disproportionately fewer amenities than other communities; this is the classic Environmental Justice, or EJ, problem. There is considerable evidence on disproportional exposure to environmental disamenities in these communities, with more recent evidence developing with regards to lesser access to environmental amenities such as green spaces. Provision of environmental amenities is often part of cities’ and communities’ efforts to renovate and revitalize polluted, segregated, and low-income neighborhoods. Yet the addition of amenities can cause changes to the neighborhood, including what is called “green gentrification” that may lead to displacement of those who most need the new amenities. Without understanding how neighborhoods change in the process of cleaning and greenspace development, it is difficult to tackle environmental injustice issues, for they may be aggravated by the distribution of amenities in urban areas. This presentation clarifies the separate concepts of gentrification and displacement, considers the city as a complex adaptive system, identifies crucial factors that are involved in neighborhood changes, provides research to gain insight onto the clusters of key factors that may lead to more desired or less desired neighborhood change, and makes policy recommendations around cleaning and greening.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
03/26/2024
Chad Kendall, USC Marshall
“Causal Narratives”
We study causal narratives – narratives which describe a (potentially incorrect) causal relationship between variables. In a series of experiments across a range of data-generating processes, we show that exogenously generated causal narratives manipulate decisions in ways inconsistent with rational theory. Instead, decisions are generally consistent with a behavioral theory, but with important exceptions, including when subjects face multiple narratives with contradictory recommendations. To study the generation and transmission of causal narratives, we show that they arise endogenously when subjects observe a dataset and provide advice to future subjects. These homegrown causal narratives mislead both the sender and receiver.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
04/02/2024
Byengseon Bae, Claremont Graduate University
“Lincoln Land Fellowship Presentation”
“Linguistic Threat and Support for the Populist Right: The Case of Donald Trump”
Existing research suggests that local demographic change in the United States is a powerful antecedent of White attitudes and behavior. Yet recent studies of demographic shifts and White voting in contemporary elections yield inconclusive and conflicting results. What explains these conflicting findings? We hypothesize that the dominant measure of racial threat–growth of the local Hispanic population–is an increasingly insufficient proxy of racial threat as White Americans acclimate to demographic change of their neighborhoods and demographic change is increasingly driven by reproduction rather than immigration. The growth of the non-English speaking population instead, we argue, is now the primary driver of racial threat and support for the populist right. Using individual-level survey data from several large national surveys, we find a strong association between local growth of the non-English speaking population and White support for Donald Trump. These results hold when subjected to a variety of robustness checks and falsification tests. Our results suggest that the traditional conceptualizations of the link between demographic change, racial threat, and voting may no longer hold in contemporary politics.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/09/2024
Tye Rush, UCSD
“The Effect of Rapid Vote-By-Mail Transition on Communities of Color”
Does negative messaging reduce vote-by-mail (VBM) uptake? Throughout the 2020 election cycle, states expanded vote-by-mail (VBM) to adapt voting practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This wave of vote-by-mail expansion was met in the mainstream with negative messaging that discredited mail ballots, going so far as to claim that these ballots lead to widespread fraud. Messages that emphasize negative or positive information can change people’s behavior to make them more risk averse, a phenomenon that scholars have dubbed as a “framing effect.” Researchers have demonstrated that framing effects can change public opinion, but few studies have studied how framing affects impact political participation. Even fewer studies assess how recent struggles with racially discriminatory elections practices can impact how effective frames can be. We examine the impact that salient VBM messages may have had on voters in the 2020 November election in a framing experiment that we conducted before the election. We tested the impact of two pro-VBM frames and one anti-VBM frame on people’s willingness to use VBM in the future. We leverage our oversample of Black and Latino voters in our analysis and find that a frame’s effectiveness varied based on racial/ethnic background. Only White people were less likely to use VBM after exposure to the negative VBM frame that questions the integrity of VBM, even after controlling for partisanship. Black, Latino, and White respondents were all more willing to use VBM after exposure to a frame ensuring the integrity of VBM and only Latino respondents were more willing to use VBM after exposure to a co-ethnic mobilizing frame. Our results suggest that how VBM is framed changes whether voters are comfortable casting their ballot by mail.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/16/2024
Kenzie De Keyser and Gesihan Zhang, Claremont Graduate University
“Lincoln Land Fellowship Presentation”
“Institutional Setups and Collective Township and Village Enterprises’ Long-term Sustainability in China”
The conventional political economy literature posits that public goods face issues due to market failures and unaddressed externalities, hindering economic efficiency, whereas private goods, through clear and protected property rights, promote economic growth. This view seems at odds with China’s experience, where economic reforms led to significant growth in collectively-owned rural enterprises (TVEs) despite initial constraints on private businesses. The rapid expansion of TVEs from 1978 to 1992 challenges the notion that only private ownership fosters long-term growth. Scholars like Kung and Lin suggest that while TVEs initially spurred economic development due to less political risk and received preferential treatment, their sustainability was compromised by increasing competition and principal-agent problems, eventually making room for the private sector. Yet, the work of Ostrom highlights that public goods can achieve economic efficiency and growth if managed by effective, self-governed institutions adhering to specific design principles. This perspective is explored in the context of China’s TVEs, suggesting that those implementing these principles were more likely to sustain their collective status, thus offering a nuanced understanding of how collective ownership can contribute to economic development under certain conditions.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Zoom link
04/23/2024
Heonuk Ha, Univerity of Southern California
“Nationalization of Local Politics: The President’s Electoral Particularism in Mayoral Elections”
Amid the growing trend of political polarization and nationalization of US politics, the link between federal and local governments has become increasingly significant in the American public policy process. Consequently, the president, as party leader, has increasingly supported co-partisan candidates, not only in federal elections but also in subnational ones. Incorporating almost 2,000 local elections for 486 cities with populations exceeding 50,000 between 2005 and 2020, we investigate how the president strategically employs key federal grant funds to assist co-partisan mayoral candidates. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression with two-way fixed effects, we find that the president distributes more key grant funds to swing cities during mayoral election years, and the corresponding (considerable) benefit is concentrated specifically on cities with co-partisan mayors during periods of unified federal government.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
04/30/2024
Gaspare Genna, University of Texas at El Paso
“Why do states regionally integrate and what are the benefits for this very deep level of cooperation?”
The presentation will review twenty plus years of scholarship by examining the political, economic, and psychological factors that help predict integration’s advancement in all regions around the world. The evidence strongly supports the need for regional asymmetric power with a convergence of preferences, values and institutions for integration to develop. The analysis includes both state level interactions and factors leading to domestic citizen support, with illustrations from European Union, the Americas, and West Africa.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Government
Zoom link
Fall Semester 2023
09/12/2023
Varun Karekurve Ramachandra, Stanford University
“Can Gender Quotas Improve Public Service Provision? Evidence from Indian Local Government”
What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? We examine the effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality. Quotas are associated with differences in the distribution of legislator effort, with quota members focusing on public goods distribution, while non-quota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. These differences in effort seem to influence institutional performance: perceived quality of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
09/19/2023
Raquel Centano, University of Southern California
“When Party and Race Align: Perceived Racial Discrimination’s Relationship with Affective Polarization”
What is the relationship between perceived racial discrimination and affective polarization? I argue that findings from extant research regarding race, partisanship, and racial discrimination suggest that perceived discrimination should also play a role in partisan affect. To evaluate the role of perceived racial discrimination in affective polarization, I use survey data from both an original nationally representative sample and 2012 – 2020 ANES data to determine how perceived racial discrimination correlates with partisan affect. I find mixed evidence that perceived discrimination on its own is associated with affective distance at the aggregate level. However, disaggregating the sample into Black, Latino, and white groups reveals the role of party messaging on race in conditioning perceived racial discrimination’s effects on partisan sentiment. These findings indicate that affective polarization is at its strongest when a voter perceives a conflict that intersects with both their partisan and racial group identities. These results suggest that researchers should consider the potential influences of race and racial politics in their study of affective polarization. Additionally worth considering is how party ideologies and messaging on race might interact with non-partisan group identities to produce more extreme partisan responses.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
Zoom link
09/26/2023
Joshua Tasoff & Monica Capra & Jin Xu, Claremont Graduate University
“The Hedonic Opportunity Cost of Attention: Information-Consumption Substitutes and Complements”
Attention is a limited resource that can be used to enhance the experience of physical consumption, and it is a necessary input for processing information. This implies that consuming in the present creates an opportunity cost to processing information about the future, and vice versa. We test this in three experiments. We find that increasing consumption in the present decreases demand for information about the future and increases demand for future risk-mitigation. The results show that there are preference interactions between information and physical consumption, with evidence consistent with attention as the mediator.
Host: Dept. of Economic Sciences
10/03/2023
Jennifer Gaudette, University of California, San Diego
“Ideological Polarization in Police Union Politics”
There are over 800,000 police officers in the U.S., and approximately 80% are union members. Police unions are the institution through which police engage in political activity. In this paper, I employ multiple methods allowing me to estimate the effects of their most frequent political activity: endorsements. I combine a novel data set of police union endorsements in mayoral elections with a conjoint survey experiment testing the effects of police union endorsements against other local interest group endorsements. I find that responses to police union endorsements split along ideological lines: police union endorsements have significant negative effects on incumbent vote share in liberal cities and positive effects in conservative cities. Conjoint survey findings support these results while solving endogeneity concerns. Further, observational data suggests that the ideological responses to police union endorsements are a recent phenomenon, suggesting that national ideological polarization has significant effects at the local level.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
10/17/2023
Steven Rogers, Saint Louis University
“Accountability in State Legislatures”
In theory, elections create incentives for state legislators to produce good policy, but is this the case? Accountability in State Legislatures answers this question and offers the most comprehensive analysis of state legislative elections, starting from candidates’ decisions to run for office to voters’ decisions at the ballot box. Over a third of state legislative incumbents do not face either a primary or general election challenger, and voters do not appreciably reward or punish state legislators in the general election for their representation, state-level policy outcomes, management of the economy, or general performance, even under favorable conditions for accountability. Accountability in State Legislatures raises serious questions regarding whether fundamental assumptions of democratic theory meaningfully apply to the “laboratories of democracy.”
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
10/10/2023
Tyler Reny, Claremont Graduate University
“The Immigration-to-Reproduction Shift: Latino Population Growth and White Support for Legal Abortion”
The literature on White Americans’ reaction to demographic change largely focuses on immigration policy at the expense of reproductive politics. We extend past research on White backlash against ethnic diversification to the domain of reproductive policy—testing the idea that prejudiced Whites will support abortion in response to growing minority populations as a means of slowing demographic change via non-White reproduction. Using a large sample of the American public, we find that Whites residing in locales with large growth in the non-White population are more supportive of legal abortion. Consistent with demographic trends, this relationship is driven by Latino population growth. Critically, this relationship is not observed among non-Whites, is confined to racially prejudiced Whites, and is most pronounced when Latino population growth coincides with growth in the local Latino youth population—suggesting that a burgeoning population of Latino children facilitates Whites’ connection of Latino growth to reproductive policy.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
10/24/2023
Kyunkook Kang, Loma Linda University
“Averting Nuclear War”
This timely book offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of nuclear stability postures worldwide, effectively highlighting their inherent limitations. Through their analysis, the authors illustrate how the seemingly contradictory perspectives of deterrence optimists, disarmament idealists, and warfighting pessimists can be reconfigured into a unified approach towards achieving regional and global peace. They suggest that these strategies can be reconciled as complementary, rather than substitute approaches, to achieve the common goal of nuclear stability. To achieve this objective, the book employs a game-theoretical framework to analytically define the conditions for nuclear war. Drawing from extensive observations of significant crises, the model incorporates identifiable systemic regularities that influence the strategic decision-making process during severe crises and establish the prerequisites for different levels of nuclear confrontation.
Host: Dept. of Politics & Policy
10/31/2023
Kal Munis, Utah Valley University
“Which Details Matter for How Americans Evaluate Political Violence?”
What factors do Americans find most important when evaluating acts of political violence? We employ two pre-registered conjoint experiments to answer this question. Normatively, details regarding the violent act (e.g., the target and violence severity) should determine the punishment for political violence. However, Social Identity Theory suggests evaluations of political violence may depend on the perpetrator’s characteristics and the relationship between the social identities of perpetrators and evaluators. Through varying both perpetrator characteristics and features of the violent act, we discern the relative weight of act-centric and perpetrator-centric considerations. We find that even though the perpetrator’s characteristics (e.g., partisanship, race) do influence people’s excusal of violence, the features of the act matter much more for citizen evaluations of political violence, on average. Though these findings can be interpreted as normatively negative given that perpetrator’s identities do influence punishment, the disproportionate effect of the violent act’s target and severity are normatively encouraging.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
11/07/2023
Yushim Kim, Arizona State University
“ChatGPT and Analytics”
ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence based on large language models, has been of great interest since the end of 2022. Excitements and fears coexist about the use and implications of ChatGPT in various settings, including education. This talk consists of two parts. I would like to discuss where the level of ChatGPT is currently by sharing my experience with ChatGPT in a graduate classroom. I will then explain the underlying technical advancements of ChatGPT (e.g., natural language models, machine learning, deep learning, and generative artificial intelligence) and discuss decision-making aided by or copiloted with machine. The talk will be open to discuss the limitations and issues of the use of ChatGPT, especially in education settings.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
11/14/2023
Adam Thal, Loyola Marymount University
“Race, Ideology, and the Politics of Higher Education”
Public universities have been referred to as “America’s best idea” and “a crowning achievement of our democracy.” Yet in recent years these institutions have come under attack, particularly in conservative states where policymakers have curtailed academic freedom and state funding at some of the nation’s best public universities. I explore some of the potential reasons why white conservative voters might support these attacks. I focus on the competing roles of ideology and race. An ideological explanation suggests that white conservatives support attacks on public universities because they are perceived as liberal institutions that benefit the Democratic party. By contrast, a racial explanation suggests this support is motivated not by a general concern about liberal ideology, but by a more specific concern about how these institutions are working to address racism. I test these competing explanations in two survey experiments, including one where participants make hypothetical decisions about what kinds of faculty to hire at their state’s elite public university. I find that white conservatives’ support for attacks on public universities is motivated more by concern over faculty teaching about race than it is by concern over faculty being “liberal” in general. Additional evidence suggests that white conservatives’ views are at odds with those of most Americans, who support faculty working to understand and address racism.
Host: Dept of. Politics & Policy
11/28/2023
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