Working Papers

• Familiar Strangers: Repeated casual contact and intergroup relations in urban South Africa

  • Abstract: Can repeated casual contact between members of different groups reduce exclusionary attitudes and behaviors? I challenge the finding that casual contact exacerbates conflict between groups by distinguishing whether casual contact is repeated. Repeated casual encounters create familiar strangers (Milgram 1970), a common, yet often neglected, social relationship that can soften boundaries between groups by providing information about out-group members' behavior. I test this proposition in urban South Africa. I analyze a dataset of 1.2 billion geographically precise cellphone pings to differentiate types of contact. I demonstrate that while contact with a larger number of immigrants predicts more extreme xenophobic attitudes and higher vote shares for an anti-immigrant party, this propensity is reduced where the incidence of familiar stranger ties is higher. By distinguishing when casual contact moderates political conflict, I demonstrate the promise of incorporating familiar stranger relationships into theories and measures of intergroup contact. + Current Draft

• The Spatial Ties that Bind: Spatial Capital, Routinized contact, and prosocial behavior in Urban Ghana

  • Abstract: While the world is rapidly urbanizing, many scholars and practitioners worry that this urbanization will lead to weaker social institutions in urban communities. In this paper, I theorize that shared spatial networks between non-coethnics can substitute for the lack of shared social networks and drive prosocial behavior by creating an expectation of future contact. I test this hypothesis in urban Ghana. I combine street data with mobility data to characterize neighborhoods by the degree to which they facilitate routinized contact between residents, which I term spatial capital. I then combine these measures with survey and administrative data to demonstrate that respondents are more likely to report community cooperation in areas with higher levels of routinized contact, especially if they are a community ethnic minority. These results suggest that spatial capital substitutes rather than complements social embeddedness. I accompany these results with a survey experiment in Accra, Ghana, to show that routinized contact increases prosocial behavior toward a non-coethnic because it shifts individuals' expectations about sanctioning and reciprocity. These findings add to the urban politics literature a consideration of the under-explored effect of shared spatial networks and spatial capital.

• Dispute Resolution in Heterogeneous Societies (with Volha Charnysh)

  • Two-thirds of the world's population lives in a country where state courts coexist with legal orders based on custom or religion. How do individuals choose between these competing forms of justice? We theorize that in countries with overlapping jurisdictions, group identity affects legal strategies by shaping expectations about the fairness and effectiveness of arbitration in different systems of justice. In a survey experiment in Accra, Ghana, we show that respondents are more likely to recommend that noncoethnics resolve the dispute in a state court and expect traditional leaders to favor coethnics. Respondents also viewed traditional leaders as less effective than state courts, but ethnicity did not affect these evaluations. We use the Afrobarometer survey to demonstrate the broader applicability of our findings, showing that respondents who live in more ethnically heterogeneous districts are less likely to view chiefs as responsible for dispute resolution or influential in their community. + Current Draft

• Accountability Under Uncertainty (with Lily Tsai, Tiago Peixoto, Fredrik M. Sjoberg, Jonathan Mellon)

  • Abstract: What can increase citizens' willingness to pay their taxes? We evaluate the effect of two common interventions - increasing opportunities for citizen voice and punishing government officials' malfeasance. Rather than focus on whether these common interventions can sway citizens' tax morale, we focus on where they have the greatest effect. Combining an original survey experiment conducted with respondents in 50 countries with methodological advances in detecting heterogeneous treatment effects, we show that reminding respondents of the successes of government anti-corruption agencies has a larger effect on tax morale in countries experiencing higher levels of socioeconomic uncertainty. The moderating effect of socioeconomic uncertainty is less consistent for the citizen participatory treatment. These analyses add to the literature on taxation by delineating an important scope condition to the efficacy of common interventions meant to increase tax morale. + Current Draft

• The Value of Dignity Appeals: Evidence from a Social Media Experiment (with Will Kymlicka, Evan Lieberman, and Blair Read)

  • Abstract: Can appeals to the shared value of "human dignity" motivate support for stigmatized and vulnerable groups? The very definition of the concept of dignity is that humans are equally worthy, and in turn, this implies that they deserve respect. In recent years, an increasing number of leaders, organizations, and institutions around the world have explicitly advanced dignity as a core value to be emphasized and protected, and we investigate whether such appeals actually influence attitudes and behaviors toward those who might be otherwise ignored or neglected were it not for a reminder of this important human value. Using the digital advertising platform on Facebook, we randomly assign ads to adult American users to estimate the effects of dignity appeals on their likelihood of engaging with ads calling for support of one of two randomly assigned vulnerable groups - those experiencing homelessness and those who are incarcerated. The approach allows us to test the effect of dignity appeals in a realistic setting that mirrors how many advocacy organizations, philanthropic groups, and political actors seek to increase engagement with their ideas. + Current Draft