While experimental studies of local election officials have found evidence of racial discrimination, we know little about whether these biases manifest in bureaucracies that provide access to ...valuable government programs and are less tied to politics. We address these issues in the context of affordable housing programs using a randomized field experiment. We explore responsiveness to putative white, black, and Hispanic requests for aid in the housing application process. In contrast to prior findings, public housing officials respond at equal rates to black and white email requests. We do, however, find limited evidence of responsiveness discrimination toward Hispanics. Moreover, we observe substantial differences in email tone. Hispanic housing applicants were 20 percentage points less likely to be greeted by name than were their black and white counterparts. This disparity in tone is somewhat more muted in more diverse locations, but it does not depend on whether a housing official is Hispanic.
The 2012 challenge to the Affordable Care Act was an unusual opportunity for people to form or reassess opinions about the Supreme Court. We utilize panel data coupled with as-if random assignment to ...reports that Chief Justice Roberts's decision was politically motivated to investigate the microfoundations of the Court's legitimacy. Specifically, we test the effects of changes in individuals' ideological congruence with the Court and exposure to the nonlegalistic account of the decision. We find that both affect perceptions of the Court's legitimacy. Moreover, we show that these mechanisms interact in important ways and that prior beliefs that the Court is a legalistic institution magnify the effect of updating one's ideological proximity to the Court. While we demonstrate that individuals can and did update their views for multiple reasons, we also highlight constraints that allow for aggregate stability in spite of individual-level change.
While the willingness of people to believe unfounded and conspiratorial explanations of events is fascinating and troubling, few have addressed the broader impacts of the dissemination of conspiracy ...claims. We use survey experiments to assess whether realistic exposure to a conspiracy claim affects conspiracy beliefs and trust in government. These experiments yield interesting and potentially surprising results. We discover that respondents who are asked whether they believe in a conspiracy claim after reading a specific allegation actually report lower beliefs than those not exposed to the specific claim. Turning to trust in government, we find that exposure to a conspiracy claim has a potent negative effect on trust in government services and institutions including those unconnected to the allegations. Moreover, and consistent with our belief experiment, we find that first asking whether people believe in the conspiracy mitigates the negative trust effects. Combining these findings suggests that conspiracy exposure increases conspiracy beliefs and reduces trust, but that asking about beliefs prompts additional thinking about the claims which softens and/or reverses the exposure's effect on beliefs and trust.
Abstract
This article examines online recruitment via Facebook, Mechanical Turk (MTurk), and Qualtrics panels in India and the United States. It compares over 7300 respondents—1000 or more from each ...source and country—to nationally representative benchmarks in terms of demographics, political attitudes and knowledge, cooperation, and experimental replication. In the United States, MTurk offers the cheapest and fastest recruitment, Qualtrics is most demographically and politically representative, and Facebook facilitates targeted sampling. The India samples look much less like the population, though Facebook offers broad geographical coverage. We find online convenience samples often provide valid inferences into how partisanship moderates treatment effects. Yet they are typically unrepresentative on such political variables, which has implications for the external validity of sample average treatment effects.
Policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking to cities to address challenges including income inequality. No existing research, however, directly and systematically measures local political ...elites’ preferences for redistribution. We interview and survey 72 American mayors—including many from the nation’s largest cities—and collect public statements and policy programs to measure when and why mayors prioritize redistribution. While many of the mayors’ responses are consistent with being constrained by economic imperatives, a sizable minority prioritize redistributive programs. Moving beyond the question of whether mayors support redistribution, we find that partisanship explains much of the variation in a mayor’s propensity for redistribution. Moreover, the impact of partisanship very rarely varies with institutional and economic contexts. These findings suggest that national political debates may be shaping local priorities in ways contrary to conventional views, and that they may matter even more than other recent findings conclude.
While the Supreme Court's legitimacy is generally considered essential to its influence, scholars continue to debate whether the Court's decisions affect individuals' assessments of it. The last week ...of the 2013 term provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate these issues because the Court made a conservative decision concerning the Voting Rights Act (VRA) only one day before it made a liberal one about same-sex marriage. We use original panel data of individuals' views throughout this period, including a wave collected on the day between the two decisions, to investigate the links among decisions and legitimacy. We find that diffuse support for the Court is sensitive to decisions in these two salient cases conditional on individuals' ideological distance to the Court and their policy support. Moreover, the negative effects of an unfavorable decision are stronger than the positive effects of a favorable one.
•Nationally representative survey of American attitudes toward recycled water.•Americans have steep deficit knowledge concerning water recycling technologies.•Relevant knowledge strongest predictor ...for support of drinking recycled water.•Americans most concerned over sewage are least likely to support recycled water.•Public campaigns should decouple recycled water and climate change to boost support.
Water recycling is one potential solution to meeting the growing global demand for water in an age of dwindling freshwater supplies. However, public opposition has played a key role historically in blunting the broad implementation of water recycling technologies across the United States. Addressing public concerns and overcoming this opposition is critical to the political viability of water recycling programs as a response to growing water insecurity. This analysis builds on existing research on Americans’ attitudes toward water recycling in three ways. First, it explores public understanding of basic elements of water recycling and identifies important gaps in public knowledge. Second, it examines the factors that most concern Americans about water recycling. Finally, it investigates how knowledge, specific concerns, and a range of other factors, including Americans’ environmental priorities, local context, partisan leanings, and demographic characteristics, combine to influence attitudes toward recycled water. The results identify several promising targets for future educational outreach efforts to build public support for water recycling projects. Policy-relevant knowledge is the single most important predictor of support for water recycling. Yet, there is a stark knowledge gap between a highly informed few and an unaware majority. Bridging this gap could greatly increase support for water recycling. Concerns about sewage contamination were most corrosive to support for water recycling, making them a prime target for further outreach. Finally, our results suggest that future educational campaigns may seek to decouple water scarcity and climate change in the public mind to avoid exacerbating existing cleavages.
Phytoremediation of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) has the potential to be a sustainable waste management technology if it can be proven to be effective in the field. Over the past decade, our ...laboratory has developed a system which utilizes plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) enhanced phytoremediation (PEP) that, following extensive greenhouse testing, was shown to be effective at remediating TPH from soils. This system consists of physical soil manipulation and plant growth following seed inoculation with PGPR. PGPR elicit biomass increases, particularly in roots, by minimizing plant stress in highly contaminated soils. Extensive development of the root system enhances degradation of contaminants by the plants and supports an active rhizosphere that effectively promotes TPH degradation by a broad microbial consortium. Following promising greenhouse trials, field tests of PEP were performed over a period of three years at a Southern Ontario site (∼130 g kg−1 TPH) used for land farming of refinery hydrocarbon waste for many years. The low molecular weight fractions (the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) fractions 1 and 2) were removed through land farming and bioremediation; the high molecular weight, recalcitrant fractions (CCME fractions 3 and 4) remained at high levels in the soil. Using PEP, we substantially remediated fractions 3 and 4, and lowered TPH from 130 g kg−1 to ∼50 g kg−1 over a three year period. The amount of plant growth and extent of oil remediation were consistently enhanced by PGPR.
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