Book

Alvarez, R. Michael, Nicholas J. Adams-Cohen, Seo-young Silvia Kim, Yimeng Li. 2020. “Securing Elections: How Data-Driven Election Monitoring Can Improve Democracy.” Cambridge University Press.

Selected Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

For a full list of publications, please see my CV.

Selected Working Papers

Support and Preference for Grassroots Fundraising (with Yimeng Li.)

Do Americans support small individual donations over other sources of political fundraising and does it matter for political behavior? Small online contributions are becoming more prevalent, and political elites and the media often idealize them as leveling the playing field in the American political ecosystem. However, we have little understanding of whether and, if so, how much the public supports small donations as a campaign funding source over others and whether such preferences translate into tangible changes in political behavior. We fill this gap with analyses of original surveys and survey experiments. Our results indicate that the public believes that there should be more small donations in American elections, fewer large individual donations, and to a much lesser extent, fewer PAC contributions. Using multiple conjoint experiments, we test whether candidates with higher dependence on small individual donors are preferred. Surprisingly, candidates relying more on small donors attract a higher likelihood of vote choice, not just within primaries or for Democrats, but across primaries, general elections, and all partisan affiliations. Such beliefs are unshaken when presented with information about lawmakers with the highest reliance on small donors, who are generally perceived as outsiders or ideologically extreme.

Who Do People Blame for Affective Polarization? (with Yuki Atsusaka.)

Affective polarization—animosity toward out-group partisans compared to copartisans—is central to discussions of the contemporary American political landscape, but the literature has not fully addressed whom people blame for the rise of partisan animosity. We analyze how people judge the relative responsibilities of different entities to affective polarization by leveraging ranking survey questions with bias correction for random responses. On average, people blame politicians the most, then traditional media, social media, interest groups, and lastly, citizens. Strong partisan differences exist in blame for traditional media, with leaning and weak Republicans (not strong Republicans) displaying strong blame attribution towards them compared to other entities. Our findings suggest that a gap between depolarization research and citizen perceptions on root causes of polarization may impact the efficacy of possible interventions, and that more research is needed to understand why anti-press attitudes might not be linear with respect to partisanship.