Research

Working Papers

Please contact me at jwu19@stanford.edu for working papers.

Abstract When do politicians communicate in uncivil ways? Current research approaches this question When do politicians communicate in uncivil ways? Current research approaches this question by theorizing incivility as a fixed property of the text. In practice, politicians are being judged by voters who view incivility through a partisan lens. Using two survey experiments and over 500 real statements made by members of the U.S. Congress, I show that perceptions of incivility differ by whether a statement was made by a co-partisan politician or not, though not uniformly so. I find that this co-partisan difference is greater for politician statements made in e-mail newsletters than those made on the Congressional floor. While Democrats and Republicans tend to find statements made by co-partisan politicians less uncivil, not all statements elicit the same difference. I introduce a supervised text method to estimate the degree of partisan disagreement over incivility at the statement level. Using the method, I find Republican politicians make statements that evoke disagreement more often than Democratic politicians do. These findings suggest depending on whose judgement of incivility we consider, we draw different conclusions on a politician's communications, especially for Republican politicians.

Publications

Abstract A common concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes. Studying Washington state’s vote-by-mail program, we link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state (2011–2018), we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weaker conditions for name-matching and the inclusion of deaths closer to Election Day, we conclude that counting dead people’s ballots as votes seems extraordinarily rare in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.
Abstract Growing concern about dubious information online threatens the credibility of legitimate news. We examine two possible mechanisms for this effect on social media. First, people might view all news on social media as less credible. Second, questionable information elsewhere in a news feed might discredit legitimate news coverage. Findings from a preregistered experiment confirm that people see information on Facebook as less credible than identical information on news websites, though the effect is small, suggesting that observational data overstates this platform penalty. Prior exposure to low (versus high) credibility information on Facebook also reduces engagement with a target article, but not its perceived credibility. However, exploratory analyses show that the effects of prior exposure to low credibility information vary depending on the plausibility of the target article, decreasing the credibility of a less plausible article (a spillover effect) but increasing the credibility of a more plausible one (a contrast effect).
Abstract The 2020 U.S. election saw a record turnout, saw a huge increase in absentee voting, and brought unified national Democratic control—yet these facts alone do not imply that vote-by-mail increased turnout or benefited Democrats. Using new microdata on millions of individual voters and aggregated turnout data across all 50 states, this paper offers a causal analysis of the impact of absentee vote-by-mail during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Focusing on natural experiments in Texas and Indiana, we find that 65-year-olds voted at nearly the same rate as 64-year-olds, despite the fact that only 65-year-olds could vote absentee without an excuse. Being just old enough to vote no-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout. Voter interest appeared to be more important in driving turnout across vote modes, neutralizing the electoral impact of Democrats voting by mail at higher rates during the historic pandemic.
Abstract In response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many scholars and policy makers are urging the United States to expand voting-by-mail programs to safeguard the electoral process. What are the effects of vote-by-mail? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive design-based analysis of the effect of universal vote-by-mail—a policy under which every voter is mailed a ballot in advance of the election—on electoral outcomes. We collect data from 1996 to 2018 on all three US states that implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that 1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party’s share of turnout, 2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party’s vote share, and 3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.

Works in Progress

“Who is uncivil: Views of members of Congress by a Democratic and Republican public”