Research

My current projects and working papers include examining training programs at gatekeepers of minority representation in American politics, gendered political participation in urban Zambi, and an online survey experiment on incentivizing peer-to-peer correction of online misinformation. My dissertation focuses on the pathways into politics in India and their implications for women’s political ambition and representation in urban politics.

Articles

Multilateral Efforts on Information Integrity: Why Greater Definition is Needed

With Alicia Wanless and Samantha Lai

Forthcoming in Springer Handbook on Disinformation: A Multidisciplinary Analysis

What Makes an Influence Operation Malign? Leveraging Classification and Policy to Assess Digital Manipulation Campaigns

With Martin J. Riedl, Alicia Wanless, and Samuel Woolley

The integrity of the information environment is essential to the health of democracies. Manipulation of it in efforts to influence audiences and outcomes threatens this integrity. At the same time, persuasion is a necessary tool in polities, including democratic ones, to encourage large groups of people to cooperate. This leads to an important question: How can influence operations be assessed in order to distinguish those that are acceptable from those that are not? This work explores possible criteria to objectively make such an assessment in the context of democracies using three case studies: U.S. efforts to sell the war in Iraq; interest-based campaigns related to climate change denial; and Narendra Modi’s WhatsApp-based BJP campaign for election in India. Each case study looks at six elements: Who is behind such operations? What activities are being carried out? What is the quality of the content involved? Who is the target audience? What are the means of distribution? In so doing, this work explores three potential criteria that could act as objective metrics for assessing the acceptability of an influence operation in the context of democracies, namely: (1) transparency in origins; (2) quality of content; and (3) calls to action.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

How COVID Drove the Evolution of Fact-Checking

With Samikshya Siwakoti, Nicola Bariletto, Luca Zanotti, Ulas Erdogdu, and Jacob N. Shapiro

With the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic came a flood of novel misinformation. Ranging from harmless false cures to dangerous rhetoric targeting minorities, coronavirus-related misinformation spread quickly wherever the virus itself did. Fact-checking organizations around the world took up the charge against misinformation, essentially crowdsourcing the task of debunking false narratives. In many places, engagement with coronavirus-related content drove a large percentage of overall user engagement with fact-checking content, and the capacity organizations developed to address coronavirus-related misinformation was later deployed to debunk misinformation on other topics.

Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

Countries have more than 100 laws on the books to combat misinformation. How well do they work?

With Ulas Erdogdu, Samikshya Siwakoti, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Alicia Wanless

Since 2015, there has been a huge increase in laws that ostensibly seek to counter misinformation. Since the pandemic began, this trend has only accelerated. Both authoritarian and democratic governments have introduced more new policies to fight misinformation in 2019 and in 2020. In authoritarian states pandemic-related misinformation provided a new justification for repressive policies. Questions of political motivations aside, as the continuing problem of pandemic misinformation illustrates, it’s unclear how effective these laws are.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Localized Misinformation in a Global Pandemic: Report on COVID-19 Narratives Around the World

With Samikshya Siwakoti, Isra Thange, Nicola Bariletto, Luca Zanotti, Alaa Ghoneim, and Jacob N. Shapiro

The global reach of the pandemic creates a unique opportunity for a regional analysis of misinformation trends, allowing us to see how misinformation actors in different countries and cultural contexts respond to the same set of potential narrative conditions. Are the observed trends in misinformation similar or different? How is the pandemic interwoven with existing social narratives at the domestic and regional level to create new and potent misinformation? How does the regional spread of COVID-19 misinformation interact with regional and domestic fact-checking efforts, and how effective is the latter in curbing misinformation spread? This report will explore those questions while examining COVID-related misinformation, disinformation, and fact-checking capabilities in different regions around the world using data collected by the ESOC team on 5,613 distinct misinformation stories from the early days of the pandemic through the end of December 2020. Analysis of these stories reveals surprising patterns. Most importantly, we find that there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the nature of misinformation and disinformation across regions and countries. Contrary to what one might expect from the globalized nature of the information environment, the salient themes varied significantly across different regions and countries. Localized false narratives prevailed over global ones.

Empirical Studies of Conflict, Princeton University

Working Papers

Gatekeepers of Representation: The Role of Candidate Training Programs on Minority Candidate Supply

With Diana Lee and Shana Hardin

In the U.S., more than 40 organizations recruit and train individuals from marginalized groups, focusing on specific identities such as race/ethnicity, gender, and younger generations. For individuals from these groups, it is common to participate in these training programs as a first step toward becoming political candidates. Therefore, the selection process of these identity-based training organizations has significant implications for the broader pool of candidates and, by extension, for descriptive representation in politics. This paper explores the role of training organizations as gatekeepers to the supply of minority candidates. Using individual-level application data from the past 10 years from an organization that recruits and trains people of color and those of immigrant heritage to run for office, we assess both the short-term and long-term effects of the organization’s selection process. First, we examine systematic socio-demographic and political differences between those selected for the training program and those who applied but were not chosen. Second, we track all applicants’ candidacy to evaluate the program’s impact by comparing the candidacy rates of program participants with those who were not selected. Finally, we conduct a survey among a sample of applicants to estimate the effect of the training program on their subsequent political ambition. This research provides important insights into the minority candidate pipeline and its implications for descriptive representation in American politics.

Unlocking Urban Democracy: Voter Engagement in Local Level Zambian Politics

With Leonardo Arriola, Nicholas Dorward and Melanie Phillips

Africa is undergoing rapid urbanization, with its urban population projected to surpass 1.34 billion by 2050 and host many of the world’s largest cities by 2100. This transformation is profoundly reshaping local political dynamics and challenging traditional gender expectations, yet these shifts remain poorly understood. Building on existing research that highlights the lower political participation of urban residents compared to their rural counterparts, we explore how Africa’s unique urbanization — marked by a decoupling from economic growth and industrialization — impacts gendered political engagement. This study compares urban and rural political dynamics, focusing on how urbanization reshapes mobilization, accountability, and responsiveness at individual, household, and societal levels. Using a conjoint experiment and a novel socio-economic sampling strategy, this paper examines how urban Zambian voters respond to gender when evaluating the political capacity of local ward councillors. By employing a two-stage conjoint design that varies the nature of a hypothetical community problem and pairs it with a randomized politician profile, we analyze the interaction between issues and identity to understand how voters evaluate politician gender in this context. Drawing on a survey of over 2,000 urban voters, our findings reveal significant gender biases, with voter expectations and beliefs about councillors’ abilities strongly shaped by stereotypes and their alignment with gendered tasks. We broaden the conceptual scope of political participation and ambition by incorporating gendered dimensions often overlooked in conventional measures and analyzing how urban settings foster distinct forms of citizen mobilization and elite strategies. Furthermore, we investigate how gendered expectations influence assessments of political efficacy and leadership in urban areas. This research offers critical insights into how urbanization and evolving gender norms shape political participation in Africa, with implications for understanding the continent’s rapidly changing political landscape.

``It’s My Duty’’: How Social Norms May Incentivize Peer-to-Peer Correction of False Claims Online

With Rachel Xu

Many approaches to tackling misinformation rely on interventions, such as media literacy campaigns and public service announcements, coordinated or managed by centralized institutions. But declining trust in institutions limits the efficacy of top-down interventions in countering false information. Peer-to-peer corrections — where social media users correct false information shared by others online — are an effective alternative approach to traditional interventions to mitigate the spread of misinformation, as demonstrated by existing literature. How can we incentivize online social media users to engage in peer-to-peer correction of false information? We conducted a survey experiment with 1550 respondents from the United States, testing whether social norm nudges are effective at encouraging peer-to-peer correction of false claims. Social norm nudges can induce behavioral change and we provide causal evidence for what types of nudges could incentivize peer-to-peer correction of false information online. We find that those who received the injunctive nudge (that primed responsibility for correction) were 7.9 percentage points less likely to correct the non-political misinformation (p-value = 0.0118) and those who received the descriptive nudge (that primed acceptability of correction) were 6.4 percentage points more likely to correct the political misinformation (p-value = 0.018). Moreover, we find that users are more likely to engage in correction of both political and non-political misinformation when they (1) perceive the false information to be harmful, (2) view themselves as knowledgeable about the topic, and (3) feel their correction will be useful. However, when they fear social sanctioning due to their correction, they are less likely to correct non-political misinformation but not political misinformation. This paper provides a significant contribution to researchers and technologists developing user-based approaches to tackling false information by demonstrating the benefits and limitations of using social norm nudges to incentivize peer-to-peer correction.

When Gatekeepers Open the Gates: Internal Party Quotas as Reputation Building Strategies

Why do political parties voluntarily adopt internal gender candidate quotas during high-stakes national elections? Existing literature provides electoral, ideological, strategic, and women’s mobilization-related explanations for voluntary party quota adoption. Motivated by two Indian political parties’ decision to adopt and implement over 33 percent quotas for women candidates in the 2019 election, I argue that parties are willing to incur short-term electoral losses if it leads to long-term gains. Through a formal model, I demonstrate that implementing quotas, in the absence of legislation mandating so and in the face of electoral costs, is a long-term reputation building strategy for political parties in single member district electoral systems. This paper contributes to the literature on why parties adopt gender quotas by providing an alternative strategic explanation. It provides a game theoretic lens to quota adoption as a reputation building strategy.

Contact for Working Paper.