D o 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 different putative ethnicities. Emails sent from Latino aliases are significantly less likely to receive any response from local election officials than non-Latino white aliases and receive responses of lower quality. This raises concerns about the effect of voter ID laws on access to the franchise and about bias in the provision of services by local bureaucrats more generally.

We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly-all key components of democratic politics-more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned. We estimated the causal effect on proximal measures, such as website pageviews and Twitter discussion of the articles' specific subjects, and distal ones, such as national Twitter conversation in broad policy areas. Our intervention increased discussion in each broad policy area by ~62.7% (relative to a day's volume), accounting for 13,166 additional posts over the treatment week, with similar effects across population subgroups.

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 applied to other racial and ethnic groups and to gender, but not to social statuses such as class or religion. Without broad comparisons across groups and different statuses, however, one cannot determine the conceptual value or appropriate empirical test of this canonical construct.Using a new national survey, we examine Americans' views of linked fate by race or ethnicity, and also by gender, class, or religion. We find that expressions of linked fate are similar across racial groups, robust to experimental manipulation, and as strong for class as for racial or ethnic identity. This may reflect a general tendency toward social connectedness more than deep group loyalty or rational calculation. Furthermore, in this survey, a sense of linked fate is rarely associated with political views or political participation. We conclude that the enormously fruitful theory of racial linked fate is due for both conceptual and empirical re-examination.

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 pool of people, as such cases are extremely common. Among first-time misdemeanor defendants, I find evidence that receiving a short jail sentence decreases voting in the next election by several percentage points. Results differ starkly by race. White defendants show no demobilization, while Black defendants show a turnout decrease of about 13 percentage points due to jail time. Evidence from prearrest voter histories suggest that this difference could be due to racial differences in who is arrested. These results paint a picture of large-scale, racially-disparate voter demobilization in the wake of incarceration.

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