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The Advanced Empirical Research on Politics for Undergraduates Program (AERoPUP) is designed to support undergraduate empirical research in any and all fields which connects to political questions. More information  about the Program and how to apply to it can be found here.

2018-2019

Matthew Harpe
Harvard University (Mentor: Prof. Gary King)

“The Role of Social Capital in Lowering Drug-, Alcohol- and Suicide-Related Mortality”

There is some preliminary research that suggests the importance of social capital in affecting mortality trends related to “deaths of despair” but this has not been examined empirically.

I will implement a multi-level model to understand the relationship between various measurers of social capital—in particular religious social capital—and mortality across demographic, regional, and educational cross-sections of the U.S. CDC mortality data will provide measures of mortality across both various causes of death and population cross-sections. I will merge the mortality data with social capital proxies from the Gallup Daily Survey, DDB Needham Life Style Surveys, and U.S. Census. I will draw on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, and National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program for economic and demographic controls.

Nikki Lin
University of Pennsylvania (Mentor: Prof. Michele Margolis)

“Individual Emotional Responses in Young Americans and Their Political Engagement”

While there is broad evidence that prompts (e.g., events, advertising) which provoke emotional responses in individuals can correlate with political engagement, there is little work on the mechanisms underlying this process. Moreover, it is unlikely that aggregate data will permit us to get very far in mapping these relationships.

This study devises an experiment in which a set of prompts are offered to experimental subjects, and their emotional responses are observed on a variety of dimensions (anger, anxiety, etc.). Another set of questions ascertains the subject’s level of political participation (both actual and contemplated). At this stage of research, it is not at all clear whether emotion moves participation, or whether past/contemplated participation shapes emotional reaction to given stimuli. My hope is that the data gathered in this survey experiment may shed some light on several questions, e.g., whether there are measurable differences between self-identified Republicans vs Democrats in the patterns which emerge.

Yihang (Genna) Liu
Dartmouth College (Mentor: Prof. Yusaku Horiuchi)

“Analyzing Truthful Immigration Policy Preferences”

A combination of conjoint and framing experiments will be employed to understand American citizens’ multidimensional preferences on immigration policy reforms. I have carefully followed the current immigration policy debate in the U.S., and I seek to understand the degree to which respondents respond to various components (i.e., specific issues) of the debate as well as how the description of immigrants -- as unauthorized, illegal, or undocumented immigrants -- might influence American citizens' policy preferences.

Although many studies are examining multidimensional preferences on immigrants based on conjoint analysis, to the best of my knowledge, this study is the first to apply conjoint analysis to understanding respondents' immigration policy preferences.

Danielle Niangar
University of Houston (Mentor: Prof Ryan Kennedy)

“American Public Opinion on Human Rights and Foreign Policy: An Experimental Evaluation”

Americans express support for institutions playing an active role in promoting human rights, but previous observational studies are prone to desirability biases. The debate over how to respond to Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination by Saudi Arabia, suggests considerable uncertainty about the public’s support for human rights promotion. In this research project, we explore the extent to which the American public cares about human rights in other countries by conducting a survey with three embedded experiments for testing support for human rights promotion and the salience of the issue for the public. The survey will utilize a vignette treatment, a conjoint experiment, and mouse tracking experiment in an online survey of a national-representative academic sample collected by Luc.id.

This research will provide experimental evidence for public support (or lack thereof) for human rights promotion in the context of international trade policy and sanctions. By engaging a nationally representative sample, I hope to further explore the topics set forth by Carnegie and Gaikwad’s (2017) and extend on this research by including human rights. This method will not only provide a more solid foundation for understanding current public opinion on international human rights, but also of how they are likely to react to the tradeoffs faced in making foreign policies related to human rights.

Akhil Rajan
Yale University (Mentor: Prof. Frances Rosenbluth)

“Does ‘Identity Politics’ Harm Liberals in Redistricting?: Evidence from Majority-Minority Districts”

Though studied for decades, different authors, each with high-quality data sets and rigorous methodologies, have purported to offer differing dispositive claims on the impacts of majority-minority districts on minority substantive representation. This study contends that the previous literature has suffered from four different problems, 1. The heterogeneity of individual districts, 2. Important theoretical impacts beyond the raw partisan vote shares, 3. Election-specific factors that limit generalizability, and, most importantly, 4. Selection bias into which states create majority-minority districts. To solve these problems, this study exploits a rare bit of randomness in the states that faced pressure to create majority-minority districts, under the test established by the Supreme Court in Thornburg v. Gingles.

Sierra Wiese
Indiana University (Mentor: Prof. Bernard Fraga)

“Measuring the Effect of Independent Redistricting Commissions on Gerrymandering”

All states must (re)define representational districts on a regular basis both for their state legislatures and their Congressional seats. Observing elections between 1982 and 2016 across all states, we can see variation in the competitiveness of elections for state-level as well as Congressional positions. Since there is variation in whether states have a) engaged in Independent Redistricting; b) when it was instituted; c) the design of the Independent Commission, we have the makings of a quasi-experiment which will permit us to discover whether there are measurable differences within states over time and between states who have and have not adopted Independent Redistricting Commissions.

Alan Yan
University of California, Berkeley (Mentor: Prof. Gabriel Lenz)

“Gain/Loss Framing and Legislator Preferences”

Are law-makers vulnerable to manipulation by the framing of issues when they are deciding how to vote on a piece of legislation? Using a survey experiment instrument with both state-level and federal legislators as subjects, this study seeks to determine whether this is true. Following the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which has found empirical support in several settings, experiments constructed will test hypotheses that legislators are more willing to support “risky” proposals when an issue is framed in the domain of losses. If the hypotheses are supported, the results will suggest a) legislators can make mistakes like anyone else, but more consequentially b) they are vulnerable to lobbyists who frame issues in this particular way, and c) may vote for bad policies based more on framing than merits. While no formal model is offered here, the results could feed into existing formal models which employ Prospect Theory, or possibly a formal model specifically applied to legislator voting preferences.

2017-2018

Marissa Adler
New York University (Mentor: Prof. Anna Harvey)

“Voting Behavior 2016: Economic Anxiety vs. Xenophobia” 

Fears within the U.S. electorate of declining living standards, possible job loss, as well as perceptions of crime and threats to homeland security tied to illegal immigration created a solid base for the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016. Using a factorial vignette survey, this study seeks to gain insight into the relative weight given by voters to these two sources of anxiety in their decision calculus.

Kathleen Bryant
College of William & Mary (Mentor: Prof. Paul Manna)

“Gerrymandered School Zones: Return to De Facto Segregation?” 

A highly debated question within literature on education administration is whether efforts to reduce segregation by school zoning has been successful. Largely absent from this debate thus far are: 1) consideration of the role played by income segregation (not only racial segregation) and 2) application of more recent spatial/GIS techniques to a debate in which space plays a central role. This study employs shapefile data from the National Center of Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau to offer new insights into the debate surrounding school zoning.

Katie Clayton
Dartmouth College (Mentor: Prof. Yusaku Horiuchi)

“Social Contact and Native Attitudes Toward Immigrants: The French Experience” 

Three randomized survey experiments will be administered to large samples of French natives to ascertain whether high vs low contact with immigrants affects: 1) their acceptance of false information in certain French regarding immigrants; 2) the extent to which immigrants are perceived as ‘threatening’; 3) characteristics of the types of immigrants considered ‘acceptable’

Joan Joseph
Florida State University (Mentor: Amanda Driscoll)

“The Long Shadow of Colonialism: The Effect of Imperial Legacies on Contemporary Institutions and Political Practices” 

Despite winning nominal independence from European powers (decades ago, in several cases) this study searches for systematic patterns between the ‘imperial variants’ of particular European colonial powers and institutional features – such as corruption and racist practices – found within many of these post-colonial states today. One important contribution is creation of a simple measure of ‘mercantile’ vs ‘settler’ colonial style, which permits observation of variation in governance within metropoles, not simply between metropoles (e.g., Britain vs France) which is the usual method. The ‘mercantile’ vs ‘settler’ classification is shown to be a significant predictor of present day levels of corruption. Several other characteristics will be examined for their hypothesized effects on present day democratization and racism.

Anthony Rentsch
University of Massachusetts (Mentor: Prof. Brian F. Schaffner)

“The Elusive ‘Likely Voter’: Improving Prediction of Who Will Vote” 

There are several reasons why an election outcome can deviate from a pollster’s prediction. But many pollsters would agree that the most bedeviling is discerning which individuals in their sample will actually show up at the polls. This is why the formulae used by most pollsters to answer this pivotal question remains proprietary. This study will employ the very richly detailed Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to build from scratch a predictive model of individual turn-out.