WORKING PROJECTS
Projects in Progress
“America Above Fahrenheit 451: Political Geography of Banned Books'' (with Jane Esberg)
extensive data collection efforts to better understand the logic of book censorship in America
“The Political Consequences of New and Non-Traditional Media” (with Kevin Munger)
Invited submission for Annual Review of Political Science“
Working Papers
“How Social Media Creators Shape Mass Politics: A Field Experiment during the 2024 US Elections” with Kirill Chmel, John Marshall, Tiffany Love-Fisher, Nathaniel Lubin
Political apathy and skepticism of traditional authorities are increasingly common, but social media creators (SMCs) capture the public's attention. Yet whether these seemingly-frivolous actors shape political attitudes and behaviors remains largely unknown. Our pre-registered field experiment encouraged Americans aged 18-45 to start following five progressive-minded SMCs on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube between August and December 2024. We varied recommendations to follow SMCs producing predominantly-political (PP), predominantly-apolitical (PA), or entirely non-political (NP) content, and cross-randomized financial incentives to follow assigned SMCs. Beyond markedly increasing consumption of assigned SMCs' content, biweekly quiz-based incentives increased overall social media use by 10% and made participants more politically knowledgeable. These incentives to follow PP or PA SMCs led participants to adopt more liberal policy positions and grand narratives around election time, while PP SMCs more strongly shaped partisan evaluations and vote choice. PA SMCs were seen as more informative and trustworthy, generating larger effects per video concerning politics. Participants assigned to follow NP SMCs instead became more conservative, consistent with left-leaning participants using social media more when right-leaning content was ascendant. These effects exceed the impacts of traditional campaign outreach and partisan media, demonstrating the importance of SMCs as opinion leaders in the attention economy as well as trust-and volume-based mechanisms of political persuasion.
”Unexpected Voices: How Cultural Agents Reshape Political Communication” with Erin York (R&R)
Digital media has transformed how citizens encounter politics, often through incidental exposure in ostensibly apolitical spaces. Prior research emphasizes content drift, in which political messages appear in non-political spaces due to algorithms or social networks. We theorize a different pathway—actor drift—in which audiences receive political content from messengers they initially followed for explicitly non-political reasons. Analyzing millions of Instagram posts and comments from chef-influencers before and after the onset of the Israel–Hamas war, we show that identity-proximate chefs integrated political commentary into their culinary posts, which drew higher engagement overall but triggered disengagement among loyal followers. This withdrawal was dose-dependent, scaling with politicization intensity, and extended even to a politically aligned audience. Rather than creating a new pathway for incidental political learning, actor drift reconfigures audience composition. These dynamics demonstrate a core tension: politicization extends the reach of cultural agents while eroding the parasocial trust that made them influential.
”Copaganda: The Cultural Foundations of Police Trust” with Tyler Reny and Esteban Fernandez (Under Review)
Despite widespread evidence and news coverage of police misconduct, public trust in American law enforcement remains remarkably stable. This persistence challenges foundational assumptions about institutional legitimacy—that trust derives primarily from real-world performance and lived experience. We argue that entertainment media offers an alternative basis for institutional trust through repeated exposure to heroic police narratives that can reframe contradictory realities. Using text analysis of television scripts, we document consistent pro-police narratives across top-rated “cop drama” programming. Four national surveys reveal robust associations between media exposure and favorable policing attitudes. Two experiments show that entertainment media cultivates trust in police across racial groups and experiential divides, including among those whose direct encounters contradict media portrayals. Effects are strongest among viewers who voluntarily choose such content, creating reinforcing spirals. In a democracy increasingly shaped by mediated narratives, trust may flow not to the most accountable institutions, but to those most effectively mythologized.
”Assessing Fox News Exposure Across Platforms” (R&R) with Taylor Carlson
Exposure is the core construct of media effects research, but it is neither sufficiently measured nor well-understood in a multi-platform media system. We bring together data on Fox News consumption across television, foxnews.com, and four social media platforms in April 2022, supplemented by individual-level survey and web-tracking data from the American Media Exposure Survey (AMES). Direct engagement with Fox News is limited and highly concentrated across each platform. Yet, about half of Fox News consumers access its content through more than one platform, and the audiences reached on each platform differ demographically. Fox News’s social media presence is not a simple extension of its broadcasts. X (formerly Twitter) disproportionately elevates morning programming, while YouTube overrepresents primetime opinion shows, meaning that platform choice alters both the volume and the substance of the content people consume. This offers one explanation for why media effects studies conducted on different platforms have produced conflicting results. Our results suggest that the empirical foundation of media effects research underestimates multi-modal consumption while overlooking how platforms transform the very content audiences consume.
“Broken Beacon? How Political Turmoil in the U.S Undermines Public Perception of Democracy in China” wiith Hanying Wei and Junyan Jiang (Dormant)
As one of the world's oldest and largest democracies, the United States has long been considered a global beacon of democratic governance. This article studies how political turmoil in America can undermine public perception of democracy beyond its borders. We compiled a list of a decade's worth of major political events in the U.S from the New York Times and matched their timing with extensive text data from social media discussions of democracy in China. Though China’s educated class has long revered America’s democratic principles, we demonstrate that major U.S. domestic turmoils---ranging from the Capitol attack to the murder of George Floyd---have significantly worsened the Chinese perception of democracy as an institutional ideal. We show that this is not a result of mediated exposure to American politics through Chinese news media but rather a direct and critical reflection of the scenes of democratic unrest. Our findings highlight that in a media environment without national boundaries, political turbulence in the West can have wide-ranging repercussions on international faith in democracy's promises.