Working Papers

“Media Manipulation (In)visibility in Chinese Newspapers”

This paper is based on a pre-registered survey experiment with mainland Chinese respondents. I demonstrate that Chinese respondents can distinguish newspaper articles scripted by the Chinese propaganda apparatus from newspaper articles written by newspapers under their own direction. I also show that Chinese respondents can make these distinctions based on content clues in the text or content of newspaper articles.

“Decline of the Sociological Imagination? Social Change and Perceptions of Economic Polarization in the United States, 1966-2013”

This paper, co-authored with Adam Goldstein, investigates the historical shifts in inequality perceptions in the United States, especially the inverse relationship between aggregate perceptions of inequality in the United States and real underlying historical trends in distributional inequality. A rich set of literature has shed considerable light on the cross-sectional correlates of inequality perceptions. What has been neglected in this growing body of evidence, however, is the historical contingency of each of these explanations. The changes in social organization that have accompanied rising inequality have changed the distribution and meaning of partisanship, class, local inequality, and local segregation, with profound implications for the relationship between each of these social categories and aggregate inequality perceptions. We showed that partisan differences in inequality perceptions dramatically widened over the 1990s and 2000s, accounting for the decline in popular perceptions of inequality over the time period.