Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments

Carnes, Nicholas; Holbein, John B.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0214244

Cited by 23 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Our sample size is comparable to or exceeds other recent audit studies that find evidence of bias and heterogeneous treatment effects (e.g., Butler and Broockman ; Carnes and Holbein ; Einstein and Glick ; Jilke, Van Dooren, and Rys ; White, Nathan, and Faller ). However, since our results suggest no bias, it is important to contextualize the magnitude of these effects and the power of the design.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to LGBT Americans

Lowande

Proctor

2019

American J Political Sci

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Marriage rights were extended to same‐sex couples in the United States in 2015. However, anecdotes of bureaucratic noncompliance (in the form of bias or denial of license issuance) raise the possibility that de jure marriage equality has not led to equality in practice. We investigate this by conducting a nationwide audit experiment of local‐level marriage license–granting officials in the United States. These officials vary in the constituencies they serve, as well as how they are selected, allowing us to evaluate long‐standing hypotheses about bureaucratic responsiveness. Overall, we find no evidence of systematic discrimination against same‐sex couples—regardless of responsiveness measure, institutions, ideology, or prior state legal history. We find, however, that among same‐sex couples, officials tended to be more responsive to lesbian couples. In contrast to evidence in other areas of service provision, such as policing and federal assistance programs, we find bureaucrats tasked with provision of marriage services show little evidence of discrimination.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to LGBT Americans

Lowande

Proctor

2019

American J Political Sci

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“…Overall, we received responses from 18.3% of journalists (22% among those that did not bounce), which is slightly on the lower end of response rates in correspondence studies (30), but indistinguishable from correspondence studies of members of Congress [that have seen a 19% response rate; see (31)], mayors in the United States [10% response rate; see (32)], and elected officials in South Africa [21% response rate; see (33)]. (That our overall response rate was on the lower side likely reflects that many correspondence studies are conducted on elected officials who have staffs to help them respond to their emails; most journalists do not have such a luxury.)…”

Section: 77%mentioning

confidence: 99%

There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover

2020

Self Cite

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Is the media biased against conservatives? Although a dominant majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats and many Americans and public officials frequently decry supposedly high and increasing levels of media bias, little compelling evidence exists as to (i) the ideological or partisan leanings of the many journalists who fail to answer surveys and/or identify as independents and (ii) whether journalists’ political leanings bleed into the choice of which stories to cover that Americans ultimately consume. Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists’ Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover. This shows that journalists’ individual ideological leanings have unexpectedly little effect on the vitally important, but, up to this point, unexplored, early stage of political news generation.

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“…It makes sense, then, that government officials rely on groups as service providers (Bauer, Poole, and Dexter 1963;Leifeld and Schneider 2012), and access to officials spreads along with resources. Powerful groups lobby more broadly (Hojnacki and Kimball 1998), and officials are willing to grant meetings to individuals from dominant groups (e.g., Carnes and Holbein nd;Kalla, Rosenbluth, and Teele 2017). Therefore, if communication is used to help maintain relationships with officials and bolster the importance of their voice, the group would not signal minority status, fear, and threat, but majority status, confidence, expertise, agreement, and promise.…”

Section: Dynamics Of Flexibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

Wilson

Djupe

2020

Politics and Religion

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It is an article of faith that organized interests represent members to elected officials making use of synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple, internal, and external channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to 2018. Text tools allow us to depict message flexibility of the FRC. We then consider how internal and external messages may be linked by examining the issue content of emails in relation to press releases. Finally, we note the bills lobbied by FRC and the frequency these are mentioned in the internal email messages. Our findings are twofold. First, they support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. Second, our evidence shows that the flexibility organized interests have in composing their communications can mean that different audiences are presented with considerably different political agendas. While FRC has significant sophisticated message flexibility, our data set indicates that such flexibility can raise serious concerns about good faith representation.

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Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments

Cited by 23 publications

References 19 publications

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to LGBT Americans

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to LGBT Americans

There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover

Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

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