“Defiant Pride: Origins & Consequences of Ethnic Voting.” American Journal of Political Science. 2025.
Why do voters often remain loyal to ethnic parties despite receiving little in terms of material welfare? I develop a theory focused on the role of dignity concerns in explaining within-group variation in ethnic party loyalty. Group members who face discrimination from state agencies dominated by outgroups respond with defiant pride, which manifests as ethnicity becoming a larger part of the self-concept. This heightened ethnic identification creates a demand for recognition through descriptive representation. Consequently, high-identifying group members—often from lower social classes—are more forgiving of malfeasance by ethnic parties and more likely to trade off material for symbolic goods. I provide experimental, descriptive, and qualitative evidence for this argument from Karachi, Pakistan—a megacity ruled for three decades by a poorly governing ethnic party. This article pushes the literature on ethnic voting beyond dominant instrumental approaches and underscores the necessity of systematically unpacking heterogeneity within ethnic groups.
“Third Party Presence and the Political Salience of Ethnicity in Survey Data” (with Niloufer Siddiqui). Journal of Politics. 2024.
In developing countries, in-person surveys are frequently conducted in the presence of respondents’ family, friends, or neighbors. What effect, if any, does their presence have on survey responses? We use data from an original survey in Karachi, Pakistan, to examine how such presence affects responses to questions related to ethnic identity and ethnic politics. We find that respondents are systematically more likely to express greater support for ethnic politics and greater feelings of perceived ethnic discrimination in the presence of known others. We present suggestive evidence that this finding is explained by social desirability bias due to a norm of in-group solidarity. Our findings have important implications for the study of ethnic politics and for survey researchers working in contexts where respondent privacy is rarely guaranteed.
“Ethnicity and Policing in the Global South: Descriptive Representation and Expectations of Police Bias” (with Nicholas Lyon). Comparative Political Studies. 2024.
City residents in the Global South commonly encounter the police. Yet, outside of established democracies, we know little about how ethnicity shapes everyday policing in diverse urban contexts. Existing approaches generate competing expectations, with some arguing that officers are more rather than less discriminatory towards coethnics. We test these theories through a survey experiment conducted in Karachi, Pakistan—one of the world’s largest megacities. We find that civilians are only marginally less likely to expect procedural justice from non-coethnic officers, even in a context where ethnicity is highly salient. However, suggestive evidence indicates that this small effect is significantly magnified for respondents who perceive their group to be underrepresented in the police. Descriptive representation is therefore a powerful moderator of the relationship between ethnicity and expectations of police bias. These results have implications for the development of effective and legitimate police institutions in weakly institutionalized contexts.
“Changing Americans’ Attitudes about Immigration: Using Moral Framing to Bolster Factual Arguments” (with Jan G. Voelkel, Chrystal Redekopp, and Robb Willer). The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Our tendency to interpret facts in ways that are consistent with our prior beliefs impedes evidence-based attempts to persuade partisans to change their views on pressing societal issues such as immigration. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here, we propose that appealing to individuals’ moral values can bolster the persuasive power of informational interventions. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. We also find a significant effect of the moral component of this message alone, even without factual information. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.
“The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence from Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom” (with Cameron Ballard-Rosa, Stephanie J. Rickard, and Kenneth Scheve). Comparative Political Studies. 2021.
What explains the backlash against the liberal international order? Are its causes economic or cultural? We argue that while cultural values are central to understanding the backlash, those values are, in part, endogenous and shaped by long-run economic change. Using an original survey of the British population, we show that individuals living in regions where the local labor market was more substantially affected by imports from China have significantly more authoritarian values and that this relationship is driven by the effect of economic change on authoritarian aggression. This result is consistent with a frustration-aggression mechanism by which large economic shocks hinder individuals’ expected attainment of their goals. This study provides a theoretical mechanism that helps to account for the opinions and behaviors of Leave voters in the 2016 UK referendum who in seeking the authoritarian values of order and conformity desired to reduce immigration and “take back control” of policymaking.
“Contesting Narratives of Repression: Experimental Evidence from Sisi’s Egypt” (with Scott Williamson). Journal of Peace Research. 2021.
Authoritarian regimes frequently attempt to justify repression by accusing their opponents of violent behavior. Are such claims successful at persuading the public to accept state-sponsored violence, and can these claims be contested effectively by human rights organizations seeking to publicize evidence contradicting the regime’s narrative? To evaluate these questions, we conducted a survey experiment in Egypt using Facebook advertisements to recruit respondents safely. The experiment evaluates the persuasiveness of competing information provided by a human rights organization and the Egyptian security forces in shaping attitudes toward an incident of state-sponsored violence in which security forces killed several leaders of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood. We find evidence for the ability of Egyptian security forces to increase support for this repression when they control the narrative about why violence was used. However, we also find that the effects of this propaganda disappear when paired with information from Human Rights Watch that counters the security forces’ justifications. These findings provide experimental evidence that propaganda can help authoritarian regimes to increase public support for repression, but they also indicate that human rights organizations can play some role in mitigating this support when they succeed at disseminating countervalent information in these contexts.
“Which Immigrants do Citizens Prefer? A Systematic Review and Meta-Reanalysis of 96 Conjoint Experiments” (with Marco Avina, Taeku Lee, Reed Rasband, Marcel Roman, and Priyanka Sethy).
In the last decade, an important literature in the social sciences has examined public attitudes toward immigrants in host societies. In it, a prominent experimental method — the conjoint design, where participants are tasked with rating or choosing between randomized profiles — has been used reliably to understand how immigrant characteristics shape admission preferences. We collate replication datasets from 100 individual studies spanning 1,475,403 immigrant profiles with 26 randomized attributes evaluated by 142,817 survey respondents from 36 countries. Meta-analyses reinforce well-established findings: economic, cultural, humanitarian, and procedural factors all influence evaluations. Our meta-reanalyses yield three novel insights. First, among collected studies, there are similar immigration preferences between countries and near-similar preferences within countries. Second, economic concerns have gained explanatory power over time. Third, attribute-based preferences for immigrants vary considerably depending on citizens' underlying political beliefs. These findings shed new light on ongoing debates and point to fruitful areas for future research.
“Who Owns the City? How Migration Shapes Urban Ethnic Mobilization.”
What explains across-group, intra-urban variation in ethnic mobilization? Existing theories emphasize either motivating conditions (e.g., poor living conditions, discrimination) or mobilization technologies (e.g., coethnic networks, minimum winning coalitions). I argue that motivating conditions are filtered through expectations, and that expectations can differ systematically between groups. In urban contexts, these expectations emerge from a group’s sense of collective psychological ownership (or lack thereof) over the city. This ownership, in turn, is shaped by the self-selection process into migration. Compared to political migrants or natives, economic migrants and their descendants tend to feel less ownership of -- and expect less from -- city life. As a result, ethnic parties face a steeper challenge in building durable ethnic constituencies among economic migrants. Drawing on over 200 interviews and a face-to-face survey of 2,000 respondents, I illustrate this theory through an in-depth comparison of the two largest ethnic groups in the megacity of Karachi.
“How Does Coethnicity with Refugees Shape their Reception? Evidence from Afghan Refugees in Pakistan” (with Niloufer Siddiqui and Yang-Yang Zhou)
How does coethnicity shape host attitudes toward refugees? Existing research often assumes that refugees who share the ethnic or cultural background of host populations will face less backlash. We test this assumption in Pakistan, where both refugee and host communities include substantial Pashtun populations. Drawing on original survey experimental, observational, and qualitative data, we find that while coethnicity increases refugee acceptance on average, this result masks sharp internal variation. Coethnic hosts who live in provinces where they are ethnic minorities are far more likely to express inclusive attitudes than those living in their ethnic homeland. The impact of coethnicity therefore depends on local context: in settings where ethnic identity is politically salient and shaped by marginalization, coethnicity withrefugees can carry both instrumental and symbolic value. These findings complicate standard assumptions about the primacy of cultural threat and underscore the need to attend to subnational variation in refugee-host dynamics.
“Explaining Integration Outcomes among Foreign-Born Latinos in America” (with Marcel Roman and Roberto Carlos)
What explains immigrant sociopolitical incorporation? Existing research emphasizes supply-side conditions – such as host-country institutions or discrimination – but pays less attention to demand-side orientations that migrants bring with them. We argue migration motive is an undertheorized factor that shapes incorporation by structuring how migrants allocate both emotional and behavioral investment across the home and host societies. Using multiple national surveys of U.S. foreign-born Latinos and an instrumental variables approach, we show that economic migrants are less incorporated into the host polity and more attached to their origin countries net of alternative explanations. This pattern arises partly because economic migrants are more likely to sustain a myth of return and to maintain enduring emotional and practical ties to the sending country. We also show some evidence that time in the host country has a weaker assimilative effect for economic migrants, conditioning long-term incorporation.
“Immigrants Against Immigration: When Naturalized Americans Favor Restrictionist Policies” (with Marco Avina and Priyanka Sethy)
Are immigrants pro-immigration? Given their own experiences and identity, we might expect immigrants to favor policies that favor other immigrants. However, recent findings challenge this assumption, particularly when it comes to naturalized immigrants who often place great importance on adherence to the same immigration rules and procedures they had to follow. This paper examines recent trends in U.S. immigrants' attitudes toward immigration focusing on significant changes that occurred during the Trump years. We leverage data on nearly 40,000 immigrant respondents to implement event study analyses. The results reveal that while naturalized citizens initially held more pro-immigrant stances than those with no immigration background, their views shifted dramatically during the 2016 election campaign and subsequent presidency, becoming most conservative by 2018. This trend was especially pronounced in the area of unauthorized immigration, where naturalized citizens exhibited a sharper restrictionist turn than any other group. By documenting this period of political change, our findings highlight how anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy shifts may cause previously pro-immigrant groups to reposition, contributing to a growing body of research on how political environments shape immigrants' preferences over immigration policy.
“The Gendered Incorporation of Foreign-Born Citizens in America” (with William Marble)
“Ethnicity and Race vs. Gender: Misogyny and In-Group Betrayal”
“The Gendered Politics of Outgroup Hate: The Case of Love Jihad in Right-Wing Propaganda” (with Rajeshwari Majumdar)
“Conceptualizing and Measuring Political Pragmatism” (with William Marble)
“Who Falsifies Their Preferences? Evidence from Two Post-Conflict Contexts” (with Melani Cammett and Vicente Valentim)
“Urban Resilience Under Climate Stress: Migration, Integration, and Adaptation in Karachi” (with Christopher Blair)
Book Review: Pakistan's Political Parties: Surviving between Dictatorship and Democracy Mariam Mufti, Sahar Shafqat and Niloufer Siddiqui, eds., Washington, DC: Georgetown University. Canadian Journal of Political Science. 2023.
“Exposure to Violence and Voting in Karachi, Pakistan” (with Niloufer Siddiqui). United States Institute of Peace Special Report. 2019.