@article {7, title = {Americans{\textquoteright} Belief in Linked Fate: Does the Measure Capture the Concept?}, journal = {The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics}, volume = {1}, year = {2016}, month = {03/2016}, pages = {117{\textendash}144}, chapter = {117}, abstract = {

For decades, scholars have attributed Black Americans\&$\#$39; unified political and policy views, despite growing internal class and status differences, to a strong perception of linked fate. In recent years, the concept has been measured in other racial and ethnic groups and with regard to gender, but not applied to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine the appropriate empirical test or most distinctive correlates of this canonical construct. Using a new national survey, we examine Americans\&$\#$39; views of linked fate by race or ethnicity, and also by gender, class, or religion. We find expressions of linked fate to be similar across racial or ethnic groups, robust to experimental manipulation, and as strong for class as for racial or ethnic identity. Intra-individual correlations on linked fate items are very high, while a sense of linked fate is rarely associated with political views or political participation. Expressions of linked fate are not always closely related to feelings of closeness to one\&$\#$39;s group or perceptions of discrimination against that group. We speculate on the broader meaning of responses to this standard item, and conclude that the enormously fruitful theory of racial linked fate is due for further conceptual development and empirical experimentation.

}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/rep.2015.3 }, author = {Gay, Claudine and Hochschild, Jennifer and White, Ariel} } @article {8, title = {When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout}, journal = {Political Behavior}, volume = {38}, year = {2016}, month = {06/2015}, pages = {355{\textendash}382}, chapter = {355}, abstract = {

Immigration enforcement, and deportation in particular, has been shown to have social and psychological effects on the non-deported as well, but its political effects have gone largely unexamined. I use the staggered implementation of Secure Communities, an information-sharing program between the federal government and local law enforcement, to estimate the short-term effects of stricter immigration enforcement on Latino voter turnout. A difference-in-differences analysis indicates that enrollment in Secure Communities led to an increase in county-level Latino voter turnout of 2\–3 percentage points. This relatively large effect appears due to greater Latino activism in the wake of program implementation, rather than individuals responding to particular police interactions. These results extend the existing literature on mobilization in response to threat, demonstrate that policies can have far-reaching and unexpected political implications, and suggest that the current immigration debate may have major consequences for the future makeup of the American electorate.

}, doi = {doi:10.1007/s11109-015-9317-5}, author = {White, Ariel} } @article {13, title = {Does Inequality Activate The System Justification Motivation?}, abstract = {

The central finding of system justification theory is that individuals have a psychological need to support, defend and justify their social system. While this motivation is thought to exist (to varying degrees) in all individuals, members of disadvantaged groups may have a stronger system justification motivation than members of advantaged groups. Such a disparity would be consistent with a prediction from system justification theory that we call the inequality-induced motivation hypothesis: the idea that inequality itself has a causal effect on individuals\’ level of system justification motivation. This hypothesis yields the counterintuitive prediction that people disadvantaged by a system should be equally or even more likely to rate the system as fair, possibly making political responses to inequality less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Research on this hypothesis to date has been based on cross-national survey data and has provided mixed results. In this paper, we take an experimental approach and ask whether economic inequality activates the system justification motivation. In addition, we compare different ways of measuring the system justification motivation, asking whether some of the null results in survey research have been due to the availability of only imperfect measures. Across three studies with a range of different samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation.\ 

}, author = {White, Ariel and Kris-Stella Trump} } @article {10, title = {Investigator Characteristics and Respondent Behavior in Online Surveys.}, abstract = {

Prior research has demonstrated how the results of surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. This paper extends the logic of that research to empirically test how information about researcher identity in online surveys, conveyed in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page, affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon\’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.

}, url = {http://christopherlucas.org/files/PDFs/MTurkaudit.pdf}, author = {White, Ariel and Anton Strezhnev and Christopher Lucas and Dominika Kruszewska and Huff, Connor} } @unpublished {9, title = {Methods for Extremely Large Scale Media Experiments and Observational Studies}, url = {http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/polmeth_poster_v3.pdf}, author = {White, Ariel and Benjamin Schneer and Gary King} } @booklet {11, title = {Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? The demobilizing effects of brief jail spells on potential voters}, abstract = {

This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration\’s effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large pool of people, as such cases are extremely common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I find evidence that receiving a short jail sentence decreases voting in the next election by several percentage points. Results differ starkly by race: White defendants show no demobilization, while Black and Latino defendants are substantially demobilized. Black defendants show a turnout decrease of about 13 percentage points due to jail time. Evidence from pre-arrest voter histories suggest that this difference could be due to racial differences in who is arrested. These results paint a picture of large-scale, racially-disparate voter demobilization in the wake of incarceration.

}, author = {White, Ariel} } @article {12, title = {The Promises \& Pitfalls of 311 Data}, abstract = {

Local governments are creating 311 public service request lines across the US, and the publicly-available data from these lines is continuously-measured, geographically finegrained, and a non-self-reported measure of citizens\’ behavior. As such, it seems a promising measure of neighborhood civic engagement. However, this data is both empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level engagement measures. We compare geographically-aggregated 311 call data to two more commonly-used measures of political and civic engagement, voter turnout and census return rates, showing that rates of 311 calls are negatively related to these other measures. We suggest that 311 data does not measure the proportion of individuals who engage with government in this way. We caution against interpreting 311 data as a measure of mass civic engagement akin to voter turnout, but argue that it is a potentially useful measure of aggregate demands for public services.\ 

}, author = {Kris-Stella Trump and White, Ariel} }