Research

Peer Reviewed Publications

“Ballots Beyond Borders: Attitudes Towards External Voting in Colombia.” (with Jair Moreira, Cara Wong, and Matthew S. Winters)

“Unwavering Support for Expatriate Voting? Resident Citizens’ Responses to Mobilization and Uncertainty.” (with Jair Moreira and Cara Wong) (under review)

As global mobility increases, more countries allow their citizens living abroad to vote in home-country elections. How resident citizens view this institution remains understudied, particularly in polarized settings where external voting has become contested. We ask whether U.S. residents update their support for external voting in response to two cues that strategic-partisan theories predict should matter: uncertainty about how non-resident citizens will vote, and competitive electoral stakes. We hypothesize that residents oppose enfranchisement when partisan implications are uncertain, that this opposition intensifies in competitive states, and that residents support enfranchisement when the diaspora is mobilized by their own party. We test these predictions with a pre-registered survey experiment fielded in four competitive and five safe states in December 2024, manipulating whether mobilization of Americans abroad is led by a non-partisan or a Democratic organization. Residents in competitive and safe states responded similarly. Non-partisan mobilization increased support for the political participation of non-resident citizens; partisan mobilization produced mixed results, raising support among Democrats but also raising their concerns about undue influence, and leaving Republicans largely unmoved. These results suggest that residents may anchor on the status quo of an established institution rather than reasoning prospectively about partisan stakes, a pattern that contrasts with recent findings on the enfranchisement of resident non-citizens.

Working Papers

“Testing the Imagined Intergroup Contact in the Myanmar Context.”

This paper examines the effects of imagined intergroup contact on outgroup trust in a non-Western, conflict-affected context. Extending a literature developed predominantly in Western settings, I test whether mental simulation of positive intergroup contact can improve outgroup attitudes among Myanmar migrants residing in the United States and Thailand. Myanmar is an interesting case to study as the relations between the Bamar majority and ethnic minority groups have been characterized by decades of armed conflict, state-sponsored discrimination, and deeply entrenched patterns of mistrust that substantially exceed the intergroup tensions examined in most existing imagined intergroup contact research. Using original survey experiments conducted across two migrant convenience samples, I find partial but theoretically informative support for the proposed mechanism. In the United States, imagined intergroup contact increased outgroup trust significantly among Bamar respondents, while the treatment effect was not statistically significant among non-Bamar respondents. In Thailand, the treatment effect on outgroup trust was positive but not statistically significant across either ethnic group, a divergence interpreted as evidence that host-country acculturation to perspective-taking and imaginary reasoning practices moderates the effectiveness of imagined intergroup contact. Across both contexts, the treatment effect was strongest among individuals who identified strongly with their ethnic ingroup. These findings extend the imagined intergroup contact paradigm into an understudied geographic and political context, identify host-country environment and ingroup identification as boundary conditions on its effectiveness, and contribute to growing calls for greater contextual diversity in intergroup contact research.

“Who is a “Migrant” in the Study of Migrant Incorporation?: Broadening Our Understanding of Migrant Populations.” (with Matthew S. Winters, Cara Wong, and Yuan-Ning Chu)

The study of migrant populations involves difficult decisions about who to include or exclude in any given piece of research. With migrant incorporation as an outcome of interest, we develop a typology of individuals comprising and associated with migrant populations. We then discuss the prevalence of these different groups across a set of five case-study countries, including ones outside North America and Europe that are not typically the focus of studies of migrant incorporation. Enumerating the categories of individuals who traditionally have been more marginalized in these studies can guide researchers toward analytically informative comparisons to help reshape our theories and improve our evaluation of integration policies. This study is supported by the Illinois Global Institute’s Migration and Refugees in Regional and Global Perspectives Initiatives and by the Center for Social and Behavioral Studies at the University of Illinois.

Work in Progress

“Outgroup Trust and Cross-Ethnic Voting: A Comparative Study.”

This study examines the relationship between outgroup trust and cross-ethnic voting across democracies in sub-Saharan Africa. I test the collective action mechanism, which proposes that individuals with high levels of outgroup trust and high levels of information on the voting intentions of co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic members are less likely to vote for a co-ethnic candidate. I test the relationship between outgroup trust and cross-ethnic voting using Afrobarometer survey data (Waves 3, 9, and 10) for sub-Saharan democracies where ethnicity is a salient political identity, as measured by the Duke DALP data. Results derived from a country fixed-effects model support the hypothesis that individuals with high levels of outgroup trust are more likely to vote for a non-co-ethnic candidate. This, however, is conditional on one’s ethnic group status: outgroup trust is a significant, positive predictor of cross-ethnic voting only among ethnic majority group members. The collective action hypothesis is supported only among ethnic minority group members — ethnic minority respondents who frequently engage in political conversations and have high levels of outgroup trust are more likely to vote for a non-co-ethnic candidate than frequent discussers with low levels of outgroup trust.

“AI-Mediated Intergroup Dialogue and Ingroup Validation in Kenya.” (with Younghyun Lee)

Ethnic divisions are one of the most persistent sources of political conflict and social mistrust in the world, yet traditional efforts to bring people together, such as community events, exchange programs, and face-to-face mediation, are expensive, logistically difficult, and hard to scale. As a result, this project asks the following question: does contact via an AI interface help people become more open and trusting of outgroup members, and does validation of that interaction from a fellow ingroup member further strengthen those improved attitudes? If so, governments, NGOs, and civic institutions could deploy this kind of platform at low cost to empower individuals to voluntarily engage across ethnic lines, especially in segregated contexts where outgroup contact is limited or strained. We test this approach in Kenya, a country characterized by significant ethnic political tension and residential segregation, conditions that limit intergroup exposure and entrench outgroup prejudice. This project makes two distinct contributions to the literature on intergroup contact and political behavior. First, it experimentally tests AI-mediated dialogue as a tool for improving outgroup attitudes, an approach that is relatively new in the intergroup relations literature. In particular, we apply this approach in Kenya, a context where AI-mediated contact has yet to be tested on a general population, offering an important test of its generalizability beyond Western settings. Second, it introduces and tests a theoretically underexplored mechanism of ingroup validation, whereby endorsement of the outgroup partner by a fellow ingroup member is hypothesized to amplify the attitude-improving effects of contact. While existing contact theory primarily focuses on the quality of the intergroup interaction itself, this project shifts attention to the social embedding of that interaction within one’s own group, offering a novel component for intervention design. The combination of AI-mediated contact with a social endorsement treatment constitutes a novel experimental paradigm in the study of ethnic politics and prejudice reduction.

“Ethnic Politics and Measuring Political Knowledge.” (with Kristin Bail)

What do people know about politics? Is political knowledge conditioned by people’s political environment? In this paper, we argue that common measures of political knowledge fail to capture how much people really know about politics, especially in contexts where ethnicity is a key factor. In places where ethnicity plays a significant role in how votes and resources are divided (i.e. clientelism or patronage-based political economy), people tend to be more interested in learning about local politics rather than politics at the national level. Using secondary data from Afrobarometer and Duke’s DALP, we test whether individuals in countries with higher levels of clientelism are less likely to know about national government than countries with lower levels. This is complemented by primary interview data in Tanzania that capture the mechanism through which ethnic politics impacts individuals’ knowledge about politics.