In the social sciences, randomized experimentation is the optimal research design for establishing causation. However, for a number of practical reasons, researchers are sometimes unable to conduct experiments and must rely on observational data. In an effort to develop estimators that can...

In recent years, social scientists have increasingly turned to matching as a method for drawing causal inferences from observational data. Matching compares those who receive a treatment to those with similar background attributes who do not receive a treatment. Researchers who use matching...

Under what conditions are individuals persuaded by political arguments encountered in the news? In this project, we integrate recent political science research on the effects of fear on persuasion with dual process models of persuasion from cognitive psychology and the Extended Parallel...

Political observers are concerned that the fragmentation of contemporary news media and the proliferation of ideological cable news options fuels opinion polarization. The potential implications are problematic: Ideological camps on the left and right of the political spectrum, with different...

Political scientists often analyze data in which the observational units are clustered into politically or socially meaningful groups with an interest in estimating the effects that group-level factors have on individual-level behavior. Even in the presence of low levels of intracluster...

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unparalleled global crisis. Yet, despite the grave adversity faced by citizens, incumbents around the world experienced a boost in popularity during the onset of the outbreak. In this study, we examine how the response to the COVID-19 outbreak in one country has...