Featured Research

Conditionally Accepted at Comparative Political Studies

In this article, we examine the demand-and-supply dynamic of security policies. We argue there are two informational shortcuts through which voters process policy alternatives and choose among them: (1) their own personal experiences with violence and (2) candidates’ profiles. We test our argument through an original survey experiment conducted in Mexico. We model voters’ decisions to support candidates campaigning over a variety of security proposals. Our survey design takes advantage of recent developments in network models to better measure the effects of crime exposure on voters’ preferences. We find that higher exposure to crime victimization is associated with increased support for only some iron-fist policies, therefore highlighting the importance of unpacking security policies instead of generalizing the results of crime exposure. We show null effects of partisan advantages and reveal the role of non-partisan heuristics, such as the candidate’s professional experience, in preferences for security policies.
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Accepted at PLOS One

This article analyzes social media engagement when elections are adjudicated to one of the contending parties. We extend existing models of political dialogue to explain differences in social media engagement (i.e. time-to-retweet) when users support the winner or losers of an election.
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Journal of Communication, 2022

Our paper describes how the sharing behavior of interconnected users alters the frequencies of content observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements, in different regions of a social network, shape how individuals interpret, classify, and define situations and events. We label this process Network Activated Frames (NAF). We test the mechanisms behind NAF with an original image-based conjoint design that replicates network activation in three surveys. Results show that partisans share more content than non-partisans and that their preferences become over-represented. Our findings show that a network of peers with cross-cutting ideological preferences will still amplify disproportionate numbers of partisan frames. Beginning with fully randomized probabilities, the output from our experiments is more extreme than the preference of the median users, as partisans activate more frame elements than non-partisans. We implement the survey experiments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
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Publications

(2023). Voting for Law and Order: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Mexico. Conditionally Accepted at Comparative Political Studies.

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(2023). Winning! Election Returns and Engagement in Social Media. Accepted at PLOS One.

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(2022). Network Activated Frames: Content Sharing and Perceived Polarization in Social Media. Journal of Communication, 2022.

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(2021). The Effect of Streaming Chat on Perceptions of Debates. Journal of Communication, 2021.

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(2021). News by popular demand: Ideology, Reputation, and Issue Attention in Social Media News Sharing. International Journal of Press/Politics, 2021.

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(2021). Partisan Cues and Perceived Risks: The effect of partisan social media frames during the Covid-19 crisis in Mexico. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties..

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(2021). Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates. Journal of Quantitative Description, Digital Media, 2021.

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Work under review

For years WhatsApp has been the primary social media application in many countries of the Global South. Numerous journalistic and …

When do users share fact-checks with their peers? We describe a survey experiment (N = 2,041) conducted during the 2019 presidential …

Dependency in large networks is among the most intractable challenges in social network analysis, as current approaches are …

This paper discusses how criminal violence affects voting behavior and citizens’ demand for security policies on unequal and …

Recent increases in uncivil dialogue, political polarization, and fake news in social media raise questions about the relationship …

Teaching

Computational Social Science

Undergraduate Seminars

Curriculum

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