Understanding and Reducing Bias among Political and Social Elites

This dissertation considers the biases that exist in the American political system. The first chapter presents a field experiment on the under-representation of women and people of color in American politics, finding that politicians may condition responsiveness and helpfulness on the ethnicity of their constituents, but not the gender of their constituents. The second chapter conducts a field experiment to study whether state legislators are responsive to public opinion and finds that most state legislators do not care about learning public opinion and therefore mis-perceive what their constituents believe. The final chapter then studies pediatricians and whether their incentives may explain low vaccination rates

Understanding and Reducing Bias among Political and Social Elites

This dissertation considers the biases that exist in the American political system. The first chapter presents a field experiment on the under-representation of women and people of color in American politics, finding that politicians may condition responsiveness and helpfulness on the ethnicity of their constituents, but not the gender of their constituents. The second chapter conducts a field experiment to study whether state legislators are responsive to public opinion and finds that most state legislators do not care about learning public opinion and therefore mis-perceive what their constituents believe. The final chapter then studies pediatricians and whether their incentives may explain low vaccination rates

Selective exposure and echo chambers in partisan television consumption: Evidence from linked viewership, administrative, and survey data

Abstract: Influential theories doubt that partisan television's audience is sufficiently large, moderate, or isolated from cross‐cutting sources for it to meaningfully influence public opinion. However, limitations of survey‐based television consumption measures leave these questions unresolved. We argue that nonpolitical attributes of partisan channels can attract voters to form habits for watching channels with slants they do not fully share. We report findings from three novel datasets which each link behavioral measures of television consumption to political administrative or survey data. We find that approximately 15% of Americans consume over 8 hours/month of partisan television. Additionally, weak partisans, independents, and outpartisans comprise over half of partisan channels’ audiences. Finally, partisan television consumers largely consume only one partisan channel and remain loyal to it over time, consistent with “echo chambers.” These findings support our argument and suggest partisan television's potential to influence public opinion cannot be dismissed

Editorial Bias in Crowd-Sourced Political Information

<div><p>The Internet has dramatically expanded citizens’ access to and ability to engage with political information. On many websites, any user can contribute and edit “crowd-sourced” information about important political figures. One of the most prominent examples of crowd-sourced information on the Internet is Wikipedia, a free and open encyclopedia created and edited entirely by users, and one of the world’s most accessed websites. While previous studies of crowd-sourced information platforms have found them to be accurate, few have considered biases in what kinds of information are included. We report the results of four randomized field experiments that sought to explore what biases exist in the political articles of this collaborative website. By randomly assigning factually true but either positive or negative and cited or uncited information to the Wikipedia pages of U.S. senators, we uncover substantial evidence of an editorial bias toward positivity on Wikipedia: Negative facts are 36% more likely to be removed by Wikipedia editors than positive facts within 12 hours and 29% more likely within 3 days. Although citations substantially increase an edit’s survival time, the editorial bias toward positivity is not eliminated by inclusion of a citation. We replicate this study on the Wikipedia pages of deceased as well as recently retired but living senators and find no evidence of an editorial bias in either. Our results demonstrate that crowd-sourced information is subject to an editorial bias that favors the politically active.</p></div

Kaplan-Meier survival curves across all studies and all conditions.

<p>Studies 1, 2, and 4 were conducted on the current U.S. senators while Study 3 was conducted using the Wikipedia pages of retired and deceased senators. Results show that among active senators, negative facts are fare more likely to be removed more quickly than positive facts.</p