Below you can find a list of my published or forthcoming research.
"Changing Tides: Public Attitudes on Climate Migration." Conditionally Accepted. The Journal of Politics. (With Sabrina B. Arias).
aBSTRACT
Abstract: Little existing work studies public perceptions of climate-induced migration. We redress this gap, drawing on diverse literatures in political science and social psychology. We argue that climate migrants occupy an intermediate position in the public view, garnering greater support than traditional economic migrants but less support than refugees. Evidence from a conjoint experiment embedded in nationally representative surveys of 2160 respondents in the U.S. and Germany provide support for this claim. Importantly, this result holds for internal and international migrants. These findings suggest the importance of humanitarian considerations and empathy in shaping migration attitudes. We use a follow-up factorial experiment to explore potential policy implications of public support for climate migrants. We find no evidence that priming climate migration increases support for climate change mitigation, echoing existing work on the difficulty of mobilizing climate action, and suggesting that climate migration is unlikely to spur greater support for mitigating climate change.
"Leadership Targeting and Militant Alliance Breakdown." Forthcoming. The Journal of Politics. (With Michael C. Horowitz and Philip B.K. Potter).
aBSTRACT
Abstract: Existing research finds that cooperation between militant groups is common and contributes to both capabilities and lethality. Comparatively little is known, however, about how militant alliances are maintained and how they break apart. We argue that leaders are critical to sustaining alliances between militant groups. As a consequence, organizational disruption in the form of leadership targeting can lead to the breakdown of militant alliances. To test this argument, we pair original data on militant alliances with data on leadership targeting to reveal that killing an organization’s leader, and particularly its founder, increases the probability that an organization’s alliances terminate. We find that leadership decapitation spurs alliance termination by incapacitating targeted groups, stoking fear among allies, and inducing preference divergence between targeted groups and allies over strategy.
"Do Women Make More Credible Threats? Gender Stereotypes, Audience Costs, and Crisis Bargaining." 2020. International Organization. (With Joshua A. Schwartz ).
- Winner of the 2019 Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) Young Investigator Competition
aBSTRACT
Abstract: As female attainment of the world's high political offices grows, it is increasingly important to understand how gender dynamics affect international politics. Toward this end, we address a gap in the literature by presenting the first evidence of how gender stereotypes affect leaders’ abilities to generate audience costs. Utilizing a survey experiment, we find evidence for the impact of a common stereotype: that men are better able to handle military crises than women. Specifically, we find that female leaders pay greater inconsistency costs for backing down from threats than male leaders do against fellow men, and the same is true for male leaders acting inconsistently against women. These findings point to particular advantages and disadvantages women have in international crises. Namely, female leaders are better able to tie-hands, an efficient mechanism for establishing credibility in crises. However, this bargaining advantage means female leaders will also have a harder time backing down from threats, which may make it more difficult for them to de-escalate crises. Findings hold critical implications for seminal debates over the effects of female leadership and greater gender equality in executive offices worldwide.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5774-5976