Political Behavior 46(3): 1443–1465 [Link]
Abstract. How do people react to information that challenges their party’s policies? While most of the existing literature focuses on possible changes in issue opinions, we know less about other implicit and explicit ways in which people may contend with counter-attitudinal information. In an online experiment in India, I present participants with potentially incongruent information about a controversial economic policy and ask them to evaluate the quality of this information. Strong party supporters (non-supporters) feel that an article that criticizes (praises) the policy is of very poor quality. Further, people are much more likely to ignore the biased nature of an article if it reinforces their priors – but complain if it does not. Yet, although I observe strong affective reactions against information that is counter-attitudinal, there is no evidence of opinion backlash; instead, there is (weak) evidence of people updating in the direction of incongruent information. These findings reinforce the importance of studying reactions to counter-attitudinal information above and beyond issue-specific opinions.
Abstract. Can online conversations with a marginalized outgroup member improve majority group members’ attitudes about that outgroup? While the intergroup contact literature provides insights about the effects of extended interactions between groups, less is known about how relatively short and casual conversations may play out in highly polarized settings, or how conversation topic can affect outcomes. In an experiment in India, I bring together Hindus and Muslims for five days of conversations on WhatsApp, a popular messaging platform, to investigate the extent to which chatting with a Muslim about randomly assigned discussion prompts affects Hindus’ perceptions of Muslims and approval for mainstream religious nationalist statements. I find that intergroup conversations greatly reduce prejudice against Muslims and approval for religious nationalist statements at least two to three weeks post-conversation. Intergroup conversations about non-political issues are especially effective at reducing prejudice, while conversations about politics substantially decrease support for religious nationalism. I further show that political conversations and non-political conversations affect attitudes through distinct mechanisms, and that conversations also reduce discrimination against Muslims in two behavioral activities.
Winner of the MPSA Best Paper Award (2024), the MPSA Best Paper in Political Behavior Award (2024), and the APSA Experimental Research Section Best Paper Award (2023); Honorable Mention for the APSA Comparative Politics Section Sage Best Paper Award (2023) and the APSA Religion and Politics Section Weber Best Conference Paper Award (2023)
Abstract. When and why do citizens express support for extreme violence by their governments? Using a survey experiment in India, I examine how majority group citizens react to different justifications of state-sponsored demolitions of property belonging to members of a marginalized minority group. I find that (a) portrayals of demolition victims as security threats, (b) appeals to trust government authorities, and (c) "whataboutisms" referring to other incidents of violence all significantly increase support for demolitions, while a more direct justification on the basis of economic development does not. I also show that perceptions of the justifications as good or bad reasons for demolishing homes are not strongly correlated with support for the action, with participants expressing support for the action even as they acknowledge poor reasoning. Taken together, these findings provide a set of new insights on how different rhetorical strategies that Indian voters are regularly exposed to across a wide range of issue areas actually operate, and why otherwise controversial policies can easily gain popular support.
Paper available upon request.
(with Tiago Ventura, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker)
Abstract. In most advanced democracies, concerns about the spread of misinformation are most often associated with feed-based social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and these platforms also account for the vast majority of research on the topic. However, in most of the world, particularly in Global South countries, misinformation often reaches citizens through social media messaging apps, particularly WhatsApp. To fill the resulting gap in the literature, we conducted a multimedia deactivation experiment intended to test the impact of reduced exposure to potential sources of misinformation on WhatsApp during the weeks leading up to the 2022 Presidential election in Brazil. We find that this treatment significantly reduced subjects’ exposure to false rumors circulating widely during the election. However, consistent with theories of mass media minimal effects, a short-term reduction in exposure to misinformation ahead of the election did not lead to significant changes in belief accuracy or political polarization.
Winner of the APSA Political Communication Section Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award (2024), the APSA Information Technology & Politics Section Best Paper Award (2024), and the Brazilian Political Science Association Best Paper Award (2024)
(with Tiago Ventura, Shelley Liu, Carolina Torreblanca, and Joshua A. Tucker)
Abstract. Recent scholarly work has investigated how social media platforms increase users' exposure to misinformation and harmful content, contributing to contemporary democratic ills such as increased levels of polarization, intergroup prejudice, and offline violence. This paper presents two distinct interventions to identify the causal effects of the most heavily used social media messaging app in the world – WhatsApp – on exposure to online misinformation and its downstream effects on political attitudes. We deploy simultaneous field experiments in India and South Africa, incentivizing participants to either (1) reduce exposure to multimedia on WhatsApp or (2) limit overall WhatsApp usage to up to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of their 2024 general elections. Our intervention significantly reduced participants’ exposure to false rumors circulating widely during the election and to overall political news. These changes in the informational environment, however, did not significantly change belief accuracy. We also detected a significant reduction in ethnic-based prejudice in India when participants reduced their overall WhatsApp usage, but estimated precise nulls for polarization outcomes in South Africa.
Paper available upon request.
(with Nicholas Haas)
Abstract. Do ideology and partisanship matter in developing countries, or is extant scholarship correct to largely dismiss these factors in favor of an understanding of politics as fundamentally clientelist? We study ideology in multiple samples of citizens from India, the world's largest democracy. Applying ideal point estimation techniques commonly used in research on Western populations, we find firstly that Indian respondents can be placed along a single ideological dimension according to their views on Hindu nationalism, state intervention, and minority rights. In contrast, issues frequently used to capture ideological divides in Western countries perform poorly in the Indian context. Second, we observe that individuals' ideological placements correlate with their partisan affiliations and reported political behaviors. Third, we find in both correlational analyses and an embedded endorsement experiment evidence consistent with a one-party dominant system, wherein feelings toward the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party carry particular import. Our findings indicate that ideology is consequential for Indian politics and may differ in important ways from the West, and call for greater attention to the ideologies of those residing in developing country contexts.
Paper available upon request. [Carnegie Endowment] [Hindustan Times]
(with Dipin Kaur and Nicholas Sambanis)
Abstract. We investigate whether Hindu support for exclusionary policies against Muslims in India is driven by (mis)perceptions of how other Hindus feel about such policies. We conduct a series of experiments with a nationally representative sample of Hindus to explore patterns of conformism to majority opinion regarding a set of policies that are related to Muslim exclusion. We find strong evidence of misperceptions of Hindu public opinion: generally, Hindus tend to overestimate the level of exclusionary attitudes held by other Hindus. We also find strong evidence of conformism to perceived public opinion. Respondents who are primed to think about other Hindus’ opinions about an issue go on to express opinions significantly closer to the perceived majority opinion (compared to those who are not primed). Next, we assess the extent to which correcting these misperceptions about public opinion is effective in reducing support for exclusionary policies. When Hindus are presented with factual information about public opinion, they update their beliefs in the direction of the information provided, once again conforming to the majority opinion. This paper contributes to our understanding of how distortions of public opinion can shape individual preferences about social issues.
(with Nicholas Haas)
Abstract. Prior research indicates that when responding to standard public opinion survey questions, individuals often report preferences which differ from those that they actually hold due to factors such as social desirability bias and inattention. We hypothesize that individuals will give party-consistent answers when it is cheaper to do so. We design a novel donation game centered around “awareness campaigns” to capture revealed preferences about salient social and political issues that we separately elicit stated preferences on. In an experimental setting, respondents in India were shown flyers advocating different issue positions and tasked with choosing how much money to donate to or remove from each flyer’s fund. Flyers were subsequently run on Google Advertisements in accordance with respondents’ allocation decisions. Consistent with our expectations, we find that individuals’ preferences are significantly more aligned with their partisan affiliation when they are stated as compared to what they are when revealed through our donation game. We also document evidence consistent with partisan motivated reasoning, as individuals’ assessments of flyers’ aesthetic aspects (such as font choice or color scheme) vary depending on whether the advocated position aligns with their partisan affiliation. Our results demonstrate the importance of preference elicitation methods and show how partisan attachments – even in a country where such attachments are generally viewed as less established and widespread than in the West – can interact with such methods to produce vastly different understandings.
Abstract. Does intergroup contact reduce outgroup prejudice in intensely divided settings? Research in political science and related disciplines offer a bevy of answers to this question, though most studies focus primarily on attitudinal rather than behavioral change. Among those that do incorporate behavioral measures, most use standard dictator games that raise serious concerns about social desirability bias. I introduce a modified dictator game to address this issue and validate my new measure using representative samples across multiple countries. This paper makes a methodological contribution to the study of ingroup bias and outgroup discrimination, and in turn, intergroup relations.
(with Maggie Macdonald et al.)
Abstract. A challenge for survey research is achieving representativeness across demographic groups. We test the extent to which ideological alignment with a survey's sponsor shapes differential partisan response and individuals' decision to participate in a research study on Facebook. While the use of Facebook advertisements for recruitment has increased in recent years and offers benefits, it can present difficulties in obtaining politically representative samples. We recruit respondents for a survey through two otherwise-identical advertisements associated with either New York University (from a liberal state) or the University of Mississippi (from a conservative state). Contrary to expectations, we do not find an asymmetry in completion rates between self-reported Democrats and Republicans based on the survey sponsor, nor do we find statistically significant differences in attitudes of respondents across the two sponsors when we control for observables. We discuss implications for social media recruitment strategies to enhance the representativeness of online survey samples.