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? This paper examines how majority group citizens react to different justifications of state-sponsored violence against a marginalized minority group. Using a survey experiment in India, I show that vague and illogical justifications (such as "whataboutisms" referring to other incidents of violence or appeals to simply trust authority figures) effectively increase Hindus’ levels of support for government demolitions of property belonging to Muslims. The results challenge the conventional view that stronger arguments are more persuasive; rather, citizens are more swayed by weak arguments, despite explicitly acknowledging their flaws when asked about the reasoning. I argue that justifications do not work because they persuasively promote the merits of demolitions, but because they raise the salience of other factors such as historical grievances. This study helps explain how adverse policies can easily gain popular support and provides insights on how different rhetorical strategies that voters are regularly exposed to actually operate.
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 research has investigated how social media platforms may spread misinformation and encourage harmful political discourse, which fuels political polarization, prejudice, and offline violence. We deploy online field experiments in Brazil, India, and South Africa to examine how restricting the use of WhatsApp, the world's most widely used messaging app, affects information exposure, political attitudes, and individual well-being. We incentivize participants to either (1) stop consuming multimedia content on WhatsApp or (2) limit overall WhatsApp usage to 10 minutes per day for four weeks ahead of each country's elections. We find that our interventions significantly reduced participants’ exposure to misinformation, online toxicity, and uncivil discussions about politics — but at the expense of keeping up with true political news. Using a wide range of measures, we detected no changes to political attitudes, but uncovered substantial gains to individual well-being as treated participants substituted WhatsApp usage for other activities. Results highlight the complex trade-offs associated with the effects of social media use on information consumption and its downstream effects.
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. Is Hindu support for anti-Muslim policies in India shaped in part by perceptions of how other Hindus feel about such policies? We explore this question through a pair of survey experiments, analyzing patterns of conformism to majority opinion regarding a set of policies that are related to Muslim exclusion. We find that Hindu respondents perceive other Hindus to be far more exclusionary than themselves. We also find strong evidence of conformism to perceived public opinion. Respondents who are asked to think about other Hindus’ opinions about an issue go on to express individual opinions that are significantly closer to the perceived majority opinion. Then, when they are presented with external information about public opinion, respondents 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.
Paper available upon request.
(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.