Melissa L Sands
Biographic Data
| ID | 921346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa L Sands |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa L |
| FAMILY NAME | Sands |
| SIGNATURE | SANDS M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4910-7509 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The policy adjacent: How affordable housing generates policy feedback among neighboring residents
While scholars have documented feedback effects among a policy's direct winners and losers, less is known about whether such effects can occur among the indirectly affected—“the policy adjacent.” Using 458 geocoded housing developments built between two nearly identical statewide ballot propositions funding affordable housing in California, we show that policy generates feedback effects among neighboring residents in systematic ways. New, nearby …
Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception
Researchers across disciplines increasingly use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to label text and images or as pseudo-respondents in surveys. But of which populations are GenAI models most representative? We use an image classification task—assessing crowd-sourced street view images of urban neighborhoods in an American city—to compare assessments generated by GenAI models with those from a nationally representative survey and a locall…
Inaccuracies in Low Income Housing Geocodes: When and Why They Matter
Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time w…
State Violence, Party Formation, and Electoral Accountability: The Political Legacy of the Marikana Massacre
Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa's Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbent…
Context and Contact: Unifying the Study of Environmental Effects on Politics
A growing literature explores how local environments, or contexts, affect political behavior, especially by shaping interpersonal contact with social out-groups. While many studies still draw directly on long-standing hypotheses from contact theory, this research agenda increasingly focuses on new research questions, beyond the classic social psychology literature, and new empirical cases, including from across the lower- and middle-income world.…
Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets
Racial Isolation Drives Racial Voting: Evidence from the New South Africa
Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot
Violent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy suppo…
Exposure to inequality affects support for redistribution
Significance As the world’s population grows more urban, encounters between members of different socioeconomic groups occur with greater frequency. I provide real-world experimental evidence that exposure to inequality shapes decision-making. By randomly assigning microenvironments of inequality, this study builds on observational research linking the salience of inequality to antisocial behavior, as well as survey experimental evidence connectin…
Uncharted Territoriality in Coproduction: The Motivations for 311 Reporting
A central question for programs that involve constituents in the coproduction of government services is: what motivates constituents to participate? This study compares two perspectives on this question: the traditional public-as-citizen model treats participation as a function of a general civic disposition that extends to many forms of civic and political participation (e.g. volunteering and voting); and we introduce the public-as-partner model…
Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot
Violent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy suppo…
Uncharted Territoriality in Coproduction: The Motivations for 311 Reporting
A central question for programs that involve constituents in the coproduction of government services is: what motivates constituents to participate? This study compares two perspectives on this question: the traditional public-as-citizen model treats participation as a function of a general civic disposition that extends to many forms of civic and political participation (e.g. volunteering and voting); and we introduce the public-as-partner model…
Context and Contact: Unifying the Study of Environmental Effects on Politics
A growing literature explores how local environments, or contexts, affect political behavior, especially by shaping interpersonal contact with social out-groups. While many studies still draw directly on long-standing hypotheses from contact theory, this research agenda increasingly focuses on new research questions, beyond the classic social psychology literature, and new empirical cases, including from across the lower- and middle-income world.…
Racial Isolation Drives Racial Voting: Evidence from the New South Africa
Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets
State Violence, Party Formation, and Electoral Accountability: The Political Legacy of the Marikana Massacre
Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa's Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbent…
Inaccuracies in Low Income Housing Geocodes: When and Why They Matter
Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time w…
Uncharted Territoriality in Coproduction: The Motivations for 311 Reporting
A central question for programs that involve constituents in the coproduction of government services is: what motivates constituents to participate? This study compares two perspectives on this question: the traditional public-as-citizen model treats participation as a function of a general civic disposition that extends to many forms of civic and political participation (e.g. volunteering and voting); and we introduce the public-as-partner model…
Exposure to inequality affects support for redistribution
Significance As the world’s population grows more urban, encounters between members of different socioeconomic groups occur with greater frequency. I provide real-world experimental evidence that exposure to inequality shapes decision-making. By randomly assigning microenvironments of inequality, this study builds on observational research linking the salience of inequality to antisocial behavior, as well as survey experimental evidence connectin…
Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riot
Violent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy suppo…
Racial Isolation Drives Racial Voting: Evidence from the New South Africa
Context and Contact: Unifying the Study of Environmental Effects on Politics
A growing literature explores how local environments, or contexts, affect political behavior, especially by shaping interpersonal contact with social out-groups. While many studies still draw directly on long-standing hypotheses from contact theory, this research agenda increasingly focuses on new research questions, beyond the classic social psychology literature, and new empirical cases, including from across the lower- and middle-income world.…
Seeing racial avoidance on New York City streets
Inaccuracies in Low Income Housing Geocodes: When and Why They Matter
Scholars across disciplines frequently employ data on housing developments subsidized by the National Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). We find that the geographic coordinates for these developments, generated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are frequently inaccurate. Using both the population of data from California and a national sample, we find that HUD-provided geocodes are inaccurate nearly half the time w…
State Violence, Party Formation, and Electoral Accountability: The Political Legacy of the Marikana Massacre
Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa's Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbent…
Nationally Representative, Locally Misaligned: The Biases of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Neighborhood Perception
Researchers across disciplines increasingly use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to label text and images or as pseudo-respondents in surveys. But of which populations are GenAI models most representative? We use an image classification task—assessing crowd-sourced street view images of urban neighborhoods in an American city—to compare assessments generated by GenAI models with those from a nationally representative survey and a locall…
The policy adjacent: How affordable housing generates policy feedback among neighboring residents
While scholars have documented feedback effects among a policy's direct winners and losers, less is known about whether such effects can occur among the indirectly affected—“the policy adjacent.” Using 458 geocoded housing developments built between two nearly identical statewide ballot propositions funding affordable housing in California, we show that policy generates feedback effects among neighboring residents in systematic ways. New, nearby …
Sociology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Law (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (3 works) · Demography (3 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (3 works) · Geography (3 works) · Law (3 works)