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Discrimination toward citizens based on race, ethnicity and gender have been analyzed extensively at the level of politicians, but much less at the level of public servants, whose mission requires prima facie impartiality towards citizens. In this study, we examine whether government offices discriminate (based on race, ethnicity, and gender) in communication with their constituencies by conducting an online email field experiment approaching public servants in Texas as a pilot study via local confederates who request information about public services. Benefitting from the variation among confederates in terms of their demographic characteristics, we match them statistically in pairs based on an extensive array of surveyed covariates, maximize the variance between individuals within each pair for the key indicator of interest, and randomly assign individuals within the pair to email a request to given government offices for additional information on a topic of the confederate’s interest. Our main outcome variable is responsiveness, particularly whether the government office replies to the request, how helpful the response is, and how much time elapses for the response to be sent. Response and non-response are analyzed using differences-in-means, linear probability regressions, and probit analysis. To analyze the data on how long it takes our confederates to receive a response, we use survival analysis techniques (also known as duration or time-to-event analysis). We anticipate that women, and racial/ethnic minorities will be subject to more discrimination, manifested by a decreased likelihood in response, poorer quality, and increased length of response time. We further conjecture that revealing political affiliation to any party – including the governing party – will also decrease government responsiveness.

Charitable organizations raise billions of dollars every year for their causes. The factors that drive donations of individuals have been extensively researched (Bachke et al. 2017; Bekkers and Wiepkings 2011; Ressler et al. 2021). Previous research has established that individuals donate more to identifiable than statistical victims, when issues are framed negatively, to mitigate natural than man-made disasters, to organizations who work in their proximity, when individuals shown in advertisement look sad, when beneficiaries are seen as different to them, and when overhead costs are low (Bhati and Hanson 2020). However, these studies are exclusively based on survey or lab experiments that tend to generalize poorly to the real world. Furthermore, findings tend to be generated by surveying US-based respondents. Our study overcomes these methodological problems by purchasing online advertisement on social media that seeks to motivate users to donate to charitable causes and randomly alter the content of advertisements to test the replicability of common findings in the literature in this real-world context and with respondents from different countries.

Russia’s incursion into the Donbas in 2014 and its subsequent meddling in the 2016 U.S. election prompted an avalanche of writing on Russian influence and information operations abroad, and now, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the topic has never been more salient. However, we have little empirical knowledge of how narratives interact with other inputs to the information environment, and dominant theories of international relations give us little insight into the channels along which Russian influence supposedly travels, the factors that mediate individual-level behavior as a result of this purported influence, or the behavioral outcomes this influence might affect. In addition, there is little research on how narratives and information messages can impact support for Ukrainian refugees. Our research plans to address this empirical gap by evaluating how different informational frames and primes influence individual-level behavioral outcomes regarding donations to Ukrainian citizens affected by the war. We ask what framing and what types of messages are most effective in inducing people to donate. Our planned study speaks to broader debates in the literature on strategic influence, the strength and relevance of transnational ties, and the factors that motivate individual-level philanthropy. By executing a field experiment in multiple countries, we deliver real-world tests of multiple interventions, with the potential to inform meaningful future policy choices. Specifically, we target online audiences in Serbia, Turkey, India, Estonia, and Kazakhstan. In all five countries, pro-Russian perspectives play a documented and influential role in shaping public opinion, or there are strong historical, cultural, and strategic reasons for citizens to adopt pro-Russian attitudes. Using A/B testing on Facebook’s ad platform, we will solicit donations to NGOs to assist Ukrainian refugees, and we use click rates on the donation link as our main outcome variable.

Across the globe, numerous individuals are hesitant to get vaccinated against COVID-19. What factors motivate individuals to pursue vaccination? To answer, we will employ a field experiment using Facebook’s A/B testing procedure. We will randomly assign individuals to see advertisements that differ in the normative reasoning for receiving a vaccine and the vaccine source itself. If participants select the ad they will be routed to official government websites for vaccine signup. We will perform the experiment across four countries: Taiwan, Turkey, South Africa, and the U.S. We will measure the number of interactions with a given ad (likes, shares, clicks) as well as the key behavioral measure of clickthroughs to the vaccine signup sites. We expect that individuals are more likely to pursue vaccination if the vaccines are produced domestically in the case of the U.S. or in countries with highly credible scientific communities. We also expect greater propensity toward vaccination for participants primed to think about protecting other people and for subjects primed with descriptive norms indicating that the vast majority plan to get vaccinated.

Three weeks before the United States capitol building was breached by Trump supporters, we sent via email a survey to 100,000 government officials each in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. In this survey, we asked the government officials a number of questions related to their views on democracy and populism. In this study, we wish to probe the question: How have the current events in The United States affected government officials’ views on populism and democracy? We will attempt to answer this question by sending the survey to a comparative sample of government officials after the capitol breach to compare responses.