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Persistent Bias Among Local Election Officials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2019

D. Alex Hughes Open the ORCID record for D. Alex Hughes [Opens in a new window] ,
Micah Gell-Redman Open the ORCID record for Micah Gell-Redman [Opens in a new window] ,
Charles Crabtree ,
Natarajan Krishnaswami ,
Diana Rodenberger  and
Guillermo Monge
D. Alex Hughes
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Micah Gell-Redman
Affiliation:
Department of International Affairs and Department of Health Policy & Management, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Charles Crabtree
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Natarajan Krishnaswami
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Diana Rodenberger
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Guillermo Monge
Affiliation:
School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
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Abstract

Results of an audit study conducted during the 2016 election cycle demonstrate that bias toward Latinos observed during the 2012 election has persisted. In addition to replicating previous results, we show that Arab/Muslim Americans face an even greater barrier to communicating with local election officials, but we find no evidence of bias toward blacks. An innovation of our design allows us to measure whether e-mails were opened by recipients, which we argue provides a direct test of implicit discrimination. We find evidence of implicit bias toward Arab/Muslim senders only.

Keywords

ballot accessturnoutfield experimentcorrespondence study
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Winter 2020 , pp. 179 - 187
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

*

The data, code, and compute environment required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8E1IIM (Hughes et al., 2019). The authors are aware of no conflicts of interest regarding this research.

References

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Supplementary material: Link

Hughes et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8E1IIM
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Hughes et al. supplementary material

Appendix

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