Publications

“Navigating the mismeasurement of intermediary variables in message-based experiments” (with Thomas Leavitt) in Political Science Research and Methods.
Researchers frequently deliver treatments through messages, as in many audit and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiments. These message-based experiments often hinge on intermediary variables—actions subjects must take to actually receive the treatment or control embedded in a message. Whether subjects open the message is a crucial intermediary step, which can serve as a condition for estimating downstream treatment effects or as an outcome of interest in its own right. Yet opens are often measured with error, most notably when some openers are misclassified as non-openers in email-based studies. We characterize the resulting bias, derive interpretable bounds on effects for well-defined subgroups, and provide sensitivity analyses for mismeasurement, thereby offering practical guidance for message-based experiments conducted through email and other communication technologies.

“Do Legislators Represent Racial Minority Opinions? Evidence on Disparities at the Congressional District Level” in Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
A large body of research shows that members of Congress disproportionately represent the interests of copartisans and affluent Americans. Is there also racial disparity in representation? I draw on three standards of political equality–proportionality, race-conscious egalitarianism, and pluralism–and assess the extent to which minority representation satisfies each. To do so, I match roll-call votes in the U.S. House of Representatives to survey data fielded prior to each vote (2006-2016) and use multilevel regression and poststratification to estimate racial subgroups’ opinions. I then examine how closely House members’ voting aligns with these opinions, focusing on districts where White and minority preferences differ. My analysis rules out `coincidental representation’ driven by similar opinions across groups and accounts for how much of each racial group’s national population resides in each district. Among districts where racial group opinions differ, I find strong support for the proportionality over the race-conscious egalitarian standard: Racial minority representation is substantially greater in majority-minority districts than in those that are not. However, I find strong evidence for the race-conscious egalitarian standard among Democratic legislators and moderate evidence for the pluralist standard among all legislators, as voting tends to align with racial minority opinion on explicitly race-targeted bills.

“Racial Cues from Unfamiliar Sources and Their Effects on Americans’ Policy Preferences” in Journal of Experimental Political Science.
Americans increasingly confront policy messages not from high-profile political figures but from everyday citizens. Much is known about the effects of racial source cues from well-known political figures with salient racial identities. Less is known about how subtle racial cues from non-recognizable sources affect Americans’ support for policies that are race-targeted and those that are not. In this paper, I conduct a randomized experiment that varies a cue of the source’s racial identity and the type of policy for which the source advocates. I uncover little evidence for the hypothesis that subtle racial source cues activate racial attitudes that lead Americans to racialize policies that are (at least explicitly) race-neutral. I find instead that subtle cues of a Black vs. White source decrease support only for race-targeted policies. I reason that two mechanisms possibly driving this effect are: (1) subtle racial source cues become salient for only race-targeted policies, thereby activating racial stereotypes for these policies but not others, and (2) Black sources are perceived as less objective policy messengers when the policy explicitly aims to rectify injustices against Black Americans. More generally, the paper’s overall findings suggest that subtle racial cues of who advocates for race-targeted policies matter for whether such policies can garner the public support they presumably need to come to fruition.

“Audit Experiments of Racial Discrimination and the Importance of Symmetry in Exposure to Cues” (with Thomas Leavitt) in Political Analysis, Vol. 32, 2024.
Researchers are often interested in whether discrimination on the basis of racial cues persists above and beyond discrimination on the basis of non-racial attributes that decision-makers infer from such cues. We show that existing audit experiments may be unable to parse these explanations because of an asymmetry in when decision-makers–e.g., employers, legislators, etc.–are exposed to racial cues and additional signals intended to rule out discrimination due to other inferred attributes. For example, an email audit experiment of legislators may provide a common signal of party in emails with different race signals in order to rule out discrimination due to legislators’ strategic incentives to appeal to co-partisans. In these designs, race is signaled by the name in the email address (at which point legislators can choose whether to open the email), but party is signaled only upon opening the email. We derive the bias that results from this asymmetry and then propose two distinct solutions. The first uses both the name and subject line to expose legislators to cues before the decision to open. The second crafts the email to ensure no discrimination in opening and then exposes legislators to cues in the body of the email after the decision to open. This second solution works when researchers do not measure opening, but can be improved when researchers do measure opening, even if with error.

“Responsiveness to Co-Ethnics and Co-Minorities: Evidence from an Audit Experiment of State Legislators” (with Julia M. Rubio) in Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Vol. 9, 2023.
How do legislators respond to coethnic and cominority constituents? We conduct an audit study of all state legislators to explore white legislators’ responsiveness to different minority groups and minority group legislators’ responsiveness to each other. Black and Latino Americans currently make up about one-third of the overall U.S. population and an even larger share of some state populations. In light of this growing diversification of the American electorate, legislators may have incentives to appeal to a broad racial constituency. In our experiment, state legislators are randomly assigned to receive an email from a white, Black, or Latino constituent. Our findings suggest a lack of legislators’ discrimination, on average, against Black relative to white constituents. Instead, we find that all legislators, on average, respond more to both white and Black constituents relative to Latinos. The evidence suggests that Black legislators do not exhibit coethnic solidarity toward their Black constituents or cominority solidarity toward their Latino constituents; however, Latinos do exhibit coethnic and cominority solidarity (though there are too few Latino legislators to definitively establish this claim). We also estimate effects among white legislators by party and racial composition of districts in order to provide suggestive evidence for white legislators’ intrinsic vs. strategic motivations.

“Language, Skin Tone, and Attitudes toward Puerto Rico in the Aftermath of Hurricane Maria” (Cover Article) in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 177, 2022.
Understanding the factors that lead Americans to racialize putatively race-neutral policies is increasingly important in a diversifying society. This paper focuses on the case of disaster relief for Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I draw on a framework of racial and ethnic subordination with two dimensions: inferiority-superiority, operationalized by skin color, and foreignness-Americanness, operationalized by language. I conduct a nationally representative survey experiment that varies the skin tone (light or dark) and language (English or Spanish) of otherwise similar actors who portray hurricane victims. The results suggest that two stigmatized attributes, dark skin and foreign language, do not always render an individual `doubly stigmatized.’ Instead, for an already racialized group like Puerto Ricans, perceived foreignness may offset Americans’ stereotypes about the cultural pathologies of a racial underclass. Therefore, this paper underscores the importance of a multidimensional and intersectional approach to the study of racial and ethnic politics.

“The Continuing Dilemma of Race and Class in the Study of American Political Behavior” (with Fredrick C. Harris) in Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 24, 2021.
This article traces the development of the study of race and class in American political behavior. It starts by challenging the American Exceptionalism thesis, namely, its premises regarding the diminutive role of social class and the absence of serious discussions about race. It then critically reviews the conventional scholarship on American political behavior and its reliance on objective indicators of social class as predictors of political preferences and participation. The article also highlights a number of studies that have conceived of class as an important social identity and have thus measured it subjectively. It then follows with a discussion on the surge of identity studies in the field of race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) and the turn towards an intersectional approach that rarely includes social class. The article ends with a discussion of the handful of studies that do consider the intersections of race and class, and underscores the need for more research of this type to advance our understanding of contemporary American political behavior.

“Turnout and Weather Disruptions: Survey Evidence from the 2012 Presidential Election in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy” (with Robert Shapiro and M. Narayani Lasala-Blanco) in Electoral Studies, Vol. 45, 2017.
This paper examines the rational choice reasoning that is used to explain the correlation between low voter turnout and the disruptions caused by weather-related phenomena in the United States. Using in-person as well as phone survey data collected in New York City where the damage and disruption caused by Hurricane Sandy varied by district and even by city blocks, we explore, more directly than one can with aggregate data, whether individuals who were more affected by the disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy were more or less likely to vote in the 2012 Presidential Election that took place while voters still struggled with the devastation of the hurricane and unusually low temperatures. Contrary to the findings of other scholars who use aggregate data to examine similar questions, we find that there is no difference in the likelihood to vote between citizens who experienced greater discomfort and those who experienced no discomfort even in non-competitive districts. We theorize that this is in part due to the resilience to costs and higher levels of political engagement that vulnerable groups develop under certain institutional conditions.

Under Review

”`¿Tu lucha es mi lucha?’ Latinos’ Attitudes toward Black Lives Matter.” Revise & resubmit.

In Progress

“Puerto Rico Public Opinion Laboratory / Laboratorio Puertorriqueño de Opinión Pública.”

“More than the ‘Usual Third?’ Understanding Latino Support for the Republican Party.”

“The Role of Women’s Recruiting Groups in New York Politics.”

Public Writing

“Survey of the Puerto Rican Electorate” / “Encuesta sobre el electorado puertorriqueño” in 9 Millones, 2020.

“Poor Weather Doesn’t Dissuade Voting in Noncompetitive Elections–Not Even Hurricane Sandy Did in 2012” (with Robert Shapiro and M. Narayani Lasala-Blanco) in United States Politics and Policy, London School of Economics, 2017.

Book Reviews

Review of Immigration and the American Ethos by Morris Levy and Matthew Wright in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 136, 2021-22.