Ariel White
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628811 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ariel White |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ariel |
| FAMILY NAME | White |
| SIGNATURE | WHITE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9409-6765 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 430 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
How Police Behavior Shapes Perceptions of Protests: Evidence from Black Lives Matter
As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variat…
Registering Returning Citizens to Vote: A Field Experiment in North Carolina
Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court's Shelby Decision
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder dramatically changed the Voting Rights Act, ending the “preclearance” process that had required federal approval before places with a history of discrimination changed their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared the decision could allow changes to election administration that would suppress minority voter participation. This paper evaluates the decisi…
Child Welfare System Contact and Voting
Getting Out the (Newly-Enfranchised) Vote: Encouraging Voter Registration After Rights Restoration
US Voting Rights Act Impact on Black and Black Versus White Infant Death Rates in Jim Crow States, 1959–1980 and 2017–2021
Objectives. To investigate the impact of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 on Black and Black versus White infant deaths in Jim Crow states. Methods. Using data from 1959 to 1980 and 2017 to 2021, we applied difference-in-differences methods to quantify differential pre–post VRA changes in infant deaths in VRA-exposed versus unexposed counties, controlling for population size and social, economic, and health system characteristics. VRA-expos…
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
Political Underrepresentation Among Public Benefits Recipients: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data
People receiving government assistance have personal stakes in the political process and intimate knowledge of policy implementation. However, data limitations have made it hard to measure voting among those receiving assistance across various programs. Using linked administrative data from a large county in Pennsylvania, merged with the Pennsylvania voter file, we calculate voting rates among benefits recipients. We find that people receiving me…
More Money, More Turnout? Minimum Wage Increases and Voting
Do minimum wage increases mobilize low-income voters? We use administrative data to measure the effect of minimum wage increases on voting behavior. We merge public records of New York City municipal employee wages to voting records to observe changes in voting by people affected and unaffected by the minimum wage across multiple elections. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that recent increases in New York's minimum wage increased vot…
How Often Do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Recent debates about enfranchising incarcerated people raise the question of how many additional votes such policies would generate. Existing research finds very low voter participation among previously incarcerated people, but it remains unclear how often people might vote from prison if given the opportunity. We use data from states that allow people to vote while incarcerated for felony crimes, to address this question. We merge prison records…
Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration
Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present …
Policy, Politics, and Public Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court
We assess the importance of the public’s policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents’ perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisansh…
Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? The Demobilizing Effects of Brief Jail Spells on Potential Voters
This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration's effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large population, as such cases are very common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I…
Family Matters? Voting Behavior in Households with Criminal Justice Contact
Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals' political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. C…
Investigator Characteristics and Respondent Behavior in Online Surveys
Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the info…
Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation
Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justifica…
The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data
Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures.…
How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas
Measuring the impact of the media The active participation of the people is one of the central components of a functioning democracy. King et al. performed a real-world randomized experiment in the United States to understand the causal effect of news stories on increasing public discussion of a specific topic (see the Policy Forum by Gentzkow). Social media posts increased by almost 20% the first day after the publication of news stories on a wi…
Americans' Belief in Linked Fate: Does the Measure Capture the Concept
For decades, scholars have attributed Black Americans' unified political and policy views, despite growing internal class and status differences, to a strong perception of linked fate. In recent years, the concept has been measured in other racial and ethnic groups and with regard to gender, but not applied to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine t…
When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout
What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials
Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of diffe…
What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials
Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of diffe…
Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? The Demobilizing Effects of Brief Jail Spells on Potential Voters
This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration's effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large population, as such cases are very common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I…
When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout
Family Matters? Voting Behavior in Households with Criminal Justice Contact
Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals' political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. C…
The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data
Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures.…
Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration
Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present …
Policy, Politics, and Public Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court
We assess the importance of the public’s policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents’ perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisansh…
Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation
Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justifica…
Investigator Characteristics and Respondent Behavior in Online Surveys
Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the info…
More Money, More Turnout? Minimum Wage Increases and Voting
Do minimum wage increases mobilize low-income voters? We use administrative data to measure the effect of minimum wage increases on voting behavior. We merge public records of New York City municipal employee wages to voting records to observe changes in voting by people affected and unaffected by the minimum wage across multiple elections. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that recent increases in New York's minimum wage increased vot…
How Often Do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Recent debates about enfranchising incarcerated people raise the question of how many additional votes such policies would generate. Existing research finds very low voter participation among previously incarcerated people, but it remains unclear how often people might vote from prison if given the opportunity. We use data from states that allow people to vote while incarcerated for felony crimes, to address this question. We merge prison records…
Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court's Shelby Decision
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder dramatically changed the Voting Rights Act, ending the “preclearance” process that had required federal approval before places with a history of discrimination changed their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared the decision could allow changes to election administration that would suppress minority voter participation. This paper evaluates the decisi…
US Voting Rights Act Impact on Black and Black Versus White Infant Death Rates in Jim Crow States, 1959–1980 and 2017–2021
Objectives. To investigate the impact of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 on Black and Black versus White infant deaths in Jim Crow states. Methods. Using data from 1959 to 1980 and 2017 to 2021, we applied difference-in-differences methods to quantify differential pre–post VRA changes in infant deaths in VRA-exposed versus unexposed counties, controlling for population size and social, economic, and health system characteristics. VRA-expos…
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
Child Welfare System Contact and Voting
Political Underrepresentation Among Public Benefits Recipients: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data
People receiving government assistance have personal stakes in the political process and intimate knowledge of policy implementation. However, data limitations have made it hard to measure voting among those receiving assistance across various programs. Using linked administrative data from a large county in Pennsylvania, merged with the Pennsylvania voter file, we calculate voting rates among benefits recipients. We find that people receiving me…
What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials
Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate in the services they provide to constituents? We use a field experiment to measure differential information provision about voting by local election administrators in the United States. We contact over 7,000 election officials in 48 states who are responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. We find that officials provide different information to potential voters of diffe…
Americans' Belief in Linked Fate: Does the Measure Capture the Concept
For decades, scholars have attributed Black Americans' unified political and policy views, despite growing internal class and status differences, to a strong perception of linked fate. In recent years, the concept has been measured in other racial and ethnic groups and with regard to gender, but not applied to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine t…
When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout
How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas
Measuring the impact of the media The active participation of the people is one of the central components of a functioning democracy. King et al. performed a real-world randomized experiment in the United States to understand the causal effect of news stories on increasing public discussion of a specific topic (see the Policy Forum by Gentzkow). Social media posts increased by almost 20% the first day after the publication of news stories on a wi…
Investigator Characteristics and Respondent Behavior in Online Surveys
Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the info…
Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation
Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justifica…
The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data
Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures.…
Misdemeanor Disenfranchisement? The Demobilizing Effects of Brief Jail Spells on Potential Voters
This paper presents new causal estimates of incarceration's effect on voting, using administrative data on criminal sentencing and voter turnout. I use the random case assignment process of a major county court system as a source of exogenous variation in the sentencing of misdemeanor cases. Focusing on misdemeanor defendants allows for generalization to a large population, as such cases are very common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I…
Family Matters? Voting Behavior in Households with Criminal Justice Contact
Contact with the criminal legal system has been shown to reduce individuals' political participation, but its effect on friends and family members is less clear. Do people who see loved ones arrested or incarcerated become mobilized to change the system, or do they withdraw from political life? I address this question using administrative data from one large county, identifying registered voters who live with someone facing misdemeanor charges. C…
Policy, Politics, and Public Attitudes Toward the Supreme Court
We assess the importance of the public’s policy agreement with the Supreme Court on public approval of the court. Using survey data on a range of recent court cases, we measure respondents’ perceived ideological closeness to the court. Then, we test various theories of court approval (doctrinal, functional, attitudinal). People who believe the court has decided recent cases as they themselves would have done, or that judges share their partisansh…
More Money, More Turnout? Minimum Wage Increases and Voting
Do minimum wage increases mobilize low-income voters? We use administrative data to measure the effect of minimum wage increases on voting behavior. We merge public records of New York City municipal employee wages to voting records to observe changes in voting by people affected and unaffected by the minimum wage across multiple elections. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that recent increases in New York's minimum wage increased vot…
How Often Do People Vote While Incarcerated? Evidence from Maine and Vermont
Recent debates about enfranchising incarcerated people raise the question of how many additional votes such policies would generate. Existing research finds very low voter participation among previously incarcerated people, but it remains unclear how often people might vote from prison if given the opportunity. We use data from states that allow people to vote while incarcerated for felony crimes, to address this question. We merge prison records…
Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration
Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present …
Political Underrepresentation Among Public Benefits Recipients: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data
People receiving government assistance have personal stakes in the political process and intimate knowledge of policy implementation. However, data limitations have made it hard to measure voting among those receiving assistance across various programs. Using linked administrative data from a large county in Pennsylvania, merged with the Pennsylvania voter file, we calculate voting rates among benefits recipients. We find that people receiving me…
US Voting Rights Act Impact on Black and Black Versus White Infant Death Rates in Jim Crow States, 1959–1980 and 2017–2021
Objectives. To investigate the impact of the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 on Black and Black versus White infant deaths in Jim Crow states. Methods. Using data from 1959 to 1980 and 2017 to 2021, we applied difference-in-differences methods to quantify differential pre–post VRA changes in infant deaths in VRA-exposed versus unexposed counties, controlling for population size and social, economic, and health system characteristics. VRA-expos…
Evaluating the Minority Candidate Penalty with a Regression Discontinuity Approach
Do parties face an electoral penalty when they nominate candidates of colour? We employ a regression discontinuity design using state legislative election data from 2018, 2019, and 2020 to isolate the effect of nominating a candidate of colour on a party's general election performance. Utilising this approach with real-world data heightens external validity relative to existing racial penalty studies, largely supported by surveys and experiments.…
How Police Behavior Shapes Perceptions of Protests: Evidence from Black Lives Matter
As Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States in recent years, protesters encountered a mix of police reactions: Some news reports described police in military gear and widespread arrests, whereas others reported minimal police involvement. We developed an original dataset of BLM protests that shows that police reactions varied widely, even when comparing protests with similar messages and tactics. We then investigated this variat…
Registering Returning Citizens to Vote: A Field Experiment in North Carolina
Throwing Away the Umbrella: Minority Voting after the Supreme Court's Shelby Decision
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder dramatically changed the Voting Rights Act, ending the “preclearance” process that had required federal approval before places with a history of discrimination changed their voting procedures. Dissenting justices and voting-rights advocates feared the decision could allow changes to election administration that would suppress minority voter participation. This paper evaluates the decisi…
Child Welfare System Contact and Voting
Getting Out the (Newly-Enfranchised) Vote: Encouraging Voter Registration After Rights Restoration
Political science (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Voting (12 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Criminology (6 works)