How No Child Left Behind encourages more affluent parents to flee poorly performing schools.

For a democracy to function properly, its citizens need to be informed. In order to raise how informed people are and to increase democratic accountability, the US has implemented performance accountability measures for public and private goods and services. In new research, John B. Holbein examines the effects of the No Child Left Behind policy, which gives citizens information about school performance. He finds that when schools fail not only does voter turnout in school board elections increase, but the number of parents – especially the affluent – exiting increases

How preregistration can help increase youth voter turnout

In the 2014 midterm elections, less than a quarter of those aged 18-29 voted, half the number of those who did who were aged 45-64. How can this poor level of youth turnout be addressed? In new research, John B. Holbein & D. Sunshine Hillygus examine the effects of preregistration laws in states like California and Florida, which allow those who are 16 or 17 to register before they are eligible to vote. By comparing the rates of those who preregister to vote with those who register traditionally, they find that preregistration can increase turnout by up to 13 percent, and that this effect is consistent for both Republicans and Democrats

George Floyd's Murder Prompted Thousands of Americans to Register to Vote

George Floyd's 2020 murder at the hands of police officers from the Minneapolis Police Department catalyzed thousands of citizens to take to the streets---protesting, rallying, and marching in communities across the United States (and beyond). But did Floyd's murder also affect citizens' broader political actions? In this paper, we employ a unique combination of large-scale validated nationwide voting records that cover all 50 states and the approximately 200 million citizens registered to vote therein and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest location and timing data from the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC). We pair these unique datasets with a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach that leverages the precise timing of the police killing of George Floyd and the precise day of protests and voter registrations. We show that in addition to mobilizing citizens to protest in the streets, George Floyd's death caused thousands of citizens to register to vote. Many of these additional registrants were minorities, youth, Democrats, and low income individuals---groups that are historically less likely to register to vote. However, George Floyd's death also mobilized a substantial number of white, older, Republicans, and higher income to register to vote. The effects we observe vary substantially across the U.S.; being larger in areas where BLM protests occurred and being considerably larger in some states than others. Simultaneously, however, increases in registration are present in both in historically red and blue states. When put into the context of other highly-salient tragedies---which often have small to null effects on citizens' rates of voter registration---the untimely death of George Floyd stands out as one that had the indirect consequence of mobilizing many citizens who come from marginalized, demobilized, and political disenfranchised backgrounds

Replication Data for: When Time Is of the Essence: A Natural Experiment on How Time Constraints Influence Elections

Replication Data for: When Time Is of the Essence: A Natural Experiment on How Time Constraints Influence Election

Replication data for: Making Young Voters: The Impact of Preregistration on Youth Turnout

Recent research has cast doubt on the potential for many electoral reforms to increase voter turnout. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of preregistration laws, which allow young citizens to register before being eligible to vote. We use two empirical approaches to evaluate the impact of preregistration on youth turnout. First, we implement difference-in-difference and lag models to bracket the causal effect of preregistration implementation using the 2000-2012 Current Population Survey. Second, focusing on the state of Florida, we leverage a discontinuity based on date of birth to estimate the effect of increased preregistration exposure on the turnout of young registrants. In both approaches we find preregistration increases voter turnout, with equal effectiveness for various subgroups in the electorate. More broadly, observed pat- terns suggest that the campaign context and supporting institutions may help to determine when and if electoral reforms are effective

Does religious bias shape access to public services? A large-scale audit experiment among street-level bureaucrats

Despite growing descriptive evidence of discrimination against minority religious groups and atheists in the United States, little experimental work exists studying whether individuals face differential barriers to receiving public services depending on their religious affiliation. Here we report results from a large-scale audit study of street-level bureaucrats in the American public school system. We emailed the principals of more than 45,000 public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious affiliation/non-affiliation of the family. To get at potential mechanisms, we also randomly assigned belief intensity. We find evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense. Our ?findings suggest that minority religious groups and atheists face important barriers to equal representation in the public arena

Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class

Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race or ethnicity. The evidence that these studies provide about racial discrimination depends on the assumption that the names researchers use differ only based on perceived race and not some other factor. In this article, we assess this common assumption using data from five different studies (n = 1,004; 2,002; 1,035; 5,631; 1,858) conducted at different times across four separate survey platforms (Lucid Marketplace, Lucid Theorem, MTurk, and Prolific). We find evidence that names commonly used to signal race/ethnicity also influence perceptions about socioeconomic status and social class. Specifically, we observe that Americans tend to think that individuals with names typically used by Black and Hispanic people have lower educational attainment and income and are of a lower social class. Even when we present respondents with the educational attainment of a named individual, respondents still perceive Black people as lower social class than White people. We discuss the implications of these findings for past and future experimental work that uses names to signal race. We also articulate the importance of choosing names that best approximate the quantity that scholars want to estimate

Validated names for experimental studies on race and ethnicity

A large and fast-growing number of studies across the social sciences use experiments to better understand the role of race in human interactions, particularly in the American context. Researchers often use names to signal the race of individuals portrayed in these experiments. However, those names might also signal other attributes, such as socioeconomic status (e.g., education and income) and citizenship. If they do, researchers would benefit greatly from pre-tested names with data on perceptions of these attributes; such data would permit researchers to draw correct inferences about the causal effect of race in their experiments. In this paper, we provide the largest dataset of validated name perceptions to date based on three different surveys conducted in the United States. In total, our data include over 44,170 name evaluations from 4,026 respondents for 600 names. In addition to respondent perceptions of race, income, education, and citizenship from names, our data also include respondent characteristics. Our data will be broadly helpful for researchers conducting experiments on the manifold ways in which race shapes American life