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In the aftermath of the 21st general election in Korea held on April 15, 2020, some started raising concerns of fraud. Not only the losing opposition conservative party candidate raised some blanket allegations about fraud, a prominent American scholar of election forensics released a report on the matter and some even went to the extent of claiming that China rigged the elections upon the request from the sitting president. Using a nationally representative sample of more than 1,500 respondents in Korea, we conducted a survey experiment in three months after an actual election, in order to investigate how claims of electoral fraud affect people’s belief in the legitimacy of election results.

Previous studies have shown that Americans are more accepting of inequality than other nationalities and that racial prejudice is a major contributor to the low levels of public support for the redistribution of wealth toward low-income workers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, American citizens have increasingly recognized the essential role low-income workers play in society. Will this growing attention to low-income workers increase public support for redistribution? Will this effect moderate the strong influence of race-based considerations in American attitudes toward redistribution? We answer these questions through a choice-based conjoint experiment, where respondents will compare two individuals and evaluate their deservingness for government assistance programs.

Despite rising income inequality over recent decades, the American public does not demand more redistribution (Kelly and Enns 2010; Kenworthy and McCall 2008). Previous studies point to racial bias as a key determinant of low public support for redistribution (Gilens 1995, 1999; Quadagno et al. 1994). A deficit of political demands for redistribution fails to incentivize policy-makers to increase welfare spending, which in turn, reinforces inequality (Brooks and Manza 2007; Soroka and Wlezien 2012; Wlezien 2004). Accordingly, the vast majority of low-income workers have suffered from poverty with little access to social support. The Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. has aggravated the financial vulnerability of low-income workers. Social distancing measures meant to curb the spread of the virus resulted in a massive job or wage loss concentrated among low-income workers, most of whom cannot work from home. Moreover, the fact that African Americans and Latinos are over-represented in low-income jobs implies that the pandemic's financial burden disproportionately affects these racial minorities despite their contribution to society. In this study, we examine how the emphasis on the essential contribution to society made by low-income workers affects non-black citizens' racial bias in their redistributive preferences. While the economic toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has most heavily affected low-income workers, perhaps ironically, the crisis has also made citizens realize how much American society relies on the labor provided by these workers. During the pandemic, many low-income workers are classified as essential workers to the basic functioning of society and continued to work jobs and put their health at risk. These jobs include bus drivers, garbage collectors, food processing plant workers, grocery store cashiers, and care providers. Although our society's dependence on these workers' labor is nothing new, their social and economic roles have become particularly salient during the current pandemic. Will this growing attention to low-income essential workers increase public support for redistribution? Further, how does it interact with the public's racial bias in their redistributive preferences? To address this question, we investigate how priming about a race of low-income essential workers (white and black) alters public support for redistribution policies.

Recent work has highlighted the potential for information about housing and neighborhood options to impact homeseekers’ choices and ultimately residential segregation and inequality. We identify a novel source of information about neighborhood ethnoracial and immigrant composition which does not violate Fair Housing Laws—the use of Spanish in online rental housing advertisements—and examine the impact of Spanish language advertisements on Whites’ and Latinos’ residential choices. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist advertisements for rental housing we show that Spanish posts are concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. We then use survey experiments to demonstrate that the use of Spanish impacts not only interest in particular housing units but also perceptions of the surrounding neighborhood. Our findings identify a new mechanism that could help maintain Latino-White segregation and demonstrate the value of combining ‘big’ data with survey experiments.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231221079001 for Predatory Inclusion in the Market for Rental Housing: A Multicity Empirical Test by Max Besbris, John Kuk, Ann Owens and Ariela Schachter in Socius