Labor unions and the defense of American democracy: The fight over ballot drop boxes during the 2022 midterm elections

This report analyzes the relationship between local labor union densityand access to ballot drop boxes during the 2022 midterm elections. Areas with greaterlabor union density had considerably more ballot drop boxes per capita than areaswith less density

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class

In the experimental study of discrimination, researchers often manipulate cues of social identity to isolate their discriminatory effects, holding all else constant. But a large literature raises both theoretical and methodological concerns about such research designs. Bridging this theoretical and empirical work, we find strong evidence that researchers face a double-bind: experimentally manipulating one identity leads survey respondents to infer information about correlated social identities (violating the information equivalence assumption), but constraining the experimental profiles to satisfy information equivalence produces rare and ungeneralizeable treatments. This methodological flaw carries important substantive implications: violations of information equivalence lead to biased estimates of race-based discrimination in ways that impact policy prescriptions. Through novel survey experiments we comprehensively examine this information equivalence violation and propose design-based solutions to this double bind. We then replicate six published audit experiments manipulating race, and show how manipulating class identity as well substantially changes estimates of racial discrimination in predictable ways, both related to theories of taste-based versus statistical discrimination and bearing important implications for anti-discrimination regulations. This registration applies to the "novel survey experiments" portion of the project

Choosing the correct estimand: a 3 x 3 resume audit experiment

We conduct a resume audit-like online experiment where we measure respondents' willingness to rent a room to an applicant based on the presumptive applicant's race (Asian, Black, or White), sex (Male, Female) and social class (upper, middle, or lower) to demonstrate how using different estimands can lead to different substantive takeaways. We then discuss both theoretical and causal inference considerations and tradeoffs about the different estimands that are typically used in identity-based discrimination experiments

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class

We are conducting an email audit experiment of US-based private criminal defense lawyers. Each lawyer will receive an email asking them if they would be willing to serve as legal representation for an individual who was arrested for DUI and released on bail. The treatments will occur in the email content and signatures. Half of our requests will be from an individual with a picture of an African-American man in the signature block of the email; the other half will include a picture of a white man. The race treatments will be crossed with 3 class conditions each: upper-class, lower-class, and neutral. The upper-class request involves someone who crashed their Porsche and was released on $10,000 bail; the lower-class request crashed their Corolla and was released on$500 bail. As well, the lower-class request has a different profession and alma mater than the upper-class profession (see attached instruments). As is typical for audit studies, our primary dependent variable is whether an email request received a response. We will also analyze the length of the response and the sentiment as measured through a word embedding model. We will analyze this experiment in line with typical audit studies, in particular White et al (2015). We will also analyze it using the Lin (2013) estimator as indicated in our attached R script. In addition, we will compare the class-neutral cues within each race. We hypothesize that the response rate for the class-neutral black condition will be more similar to the lower-class black condition than the upper-class black condition, and that the class-neutral white condition will be closer to the upper-class white condition than the lower-class white condition. We will analyze this experiment in line with typical audit studies, in particular White et al (2015). We will also analyze it using the Lin (2013) estimator as indicated in our attached R script

Improving Compliance in Experimental Studies of Discrimination

\noindent In experimental studies of discrimination, researchers often manipulate cues of social identities such as race to isolate their discriminatory effects, holding all else constant. However, these studies cannot distinguish between \textit{noncompliance}, in which respondents do not observe, acknowledge, or update their beliefs about the social identity being signaled, and \textit{nondiscrimination}, in which respondents update their beliefs based on the signal but do not discriminate. Focusing on experiments addressing racial discrimination, we find evidence from a pre-registered, nationally representative survey experiment that racialized name cues suffer from compliance as low as 33%, especially for Black treatments. Adding pre-tested racialized pictures and resume items improves compliance to 95% on average and reduces the variance in compliance across racial treatment groups. Our simulation studies show that this noncompliance tends to attenuate the estimated effects of race by as much as 85\%, implying that racial discrimination may be much deeper than decades of experiments have suggested

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class: State Legislator Audit

This registration covers our audit experiment of US state legislators

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class: Dating study

This study, a pseudo-audit study conducted as part of a broader study on Disentangling Multiple Identities in Studies of Discrimination, asks online survey respondents to assess the dating profiles of hypothetical individuals. The goal is to study how class and race interact in shaping dating preferences. The experimental design is factorial: each dating profile is either white or black, and either has an upper-class cue, a lower-class cue, or no class cue; there are 3 possible images for each race and sex

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class: Stereotypicality Experiment

What do Americans assume about others of different race or class backgrounds than them? In this experiment, we will test American participants' default assumptions about hypothetical Black and White Americans. This 2x3 factorial experiment varies race (White, Black) and class cues (pro-social lower-class, anti-social lower-class, generic lower-class), and measures respondents' impressions and favorability of each profile. We hypothesize that respondents will view the generic lower-class Black profile as similar to the anti-social lower-class Black profile, but that the generic lower-class White profile will have similar favorability to the pro-social lower-class White profile

Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class: (Non-)Compliance Experiment

Audit studies often seek to estimate the effects of race on discrimination: these experiments provide a racialized cue, often a name, and then measure how outcomes vary by cue. However, these studies assume that respondents can accurately identify the race each racialized cue is linked to, and this assumption is never rigorously tested. This study experimentally measures respondents' capacity to identify the race of an applicant using one or more treatment cues common in audit studies. We test name cues, picture cues, and racialized resume item cues, alone and in combination, to measure respondents' race compliance for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian profiles, both of male and female