Research
Working Papers
Please contact me at jwu19@stanford.edu for working papers.
- “Politician Incivility in the United States: Toward Preserving Disagreement in Evaluation” (Under Review)
Abstract
I argue that capturing different group perceptions of politician incivility contributes to our understanding of politicians' incentives. While an objective classification goal makes sense in certain contexts, such as interpreting documents for law, there are other cases where disagreement among coders is informative. For example, how politicians' speech is interpreted by different groups of voters can influence how politicians communicate. Using over 500 real statements by U.S. members of Congress in two survey experiments, I find voters perceive statements made by out-partisan politicians as uncivil more often than those made by co-partisan ones. ßThen, I provide a supervised text method to study when and how much partisans disagree on a comment's incivility. Using this method, I find that greater disagreement is correlated with ideological extremity of the politician who made the statement and statements with more negative words. Overall, the results suggest that disagreement contains pertinent information to understanding politician incentives.Publications
Wu, Jennifer, Chenoa Yorgason, Hanna Folsz, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew Myers, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall. 2024. “Are Dead People Voting by Mail: Evidence from Washington State Administrative Data.” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy. <link>
Alexander Agadjanian, Jacob Cruger, Sydney House, Annie Huang, Noah Kanter, Celeste Kearney, Junghye Kim, Isabelle Leonaitis, Sarah Petroni, Leonardo Placeres, Morgan Quental, Henry Sanford, Cameron Skaf, Jennifer Wu, Lillian Zhao, and Brendan Nyhan. 2023. “A Platform Penalty for News? How Social Media Context Can Alter Information Credibility Online.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 20(3): 338-348. <link>
Yoder, Jesse, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew Myers, Tobias Nowacki, Daniel M. Thompson, Jennifer A. Wu, Chenoa Yorgason, and Andrew B. Hall. 2021. “How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?” Science Advances 7(52): eabk1755. <link>
Thompson, Daniel M., Jennifer A. Wu, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall. 2020. “Universal Vote-by-Mail Has No Impact on Partisan Turnout or Vote Share.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(25): 14052-14056. <link>
Works in Progress
“When are U.S. members of Congress uncivil?: Views of a Democratic and Republican public”