Intersectionality and Information Equivalence in Experimental Studies of Race and Class

Abstract

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