Meanwhile, the Trump administration can use this misinformed public opinion to justify cutting programs that not only save lives globally, but also, as the NYT reported today, support pro-democracy initiatives at a time when authoritarianism is rising worldwide, including here in the United States.

A troubling aspect of the current culture war is that distrust of academics by those on the political right means research like ours is unlikely to reach or influence those audiences. As a result, the inaccurate beliefs driving support for aid cuts are likely to persist.

These positive effects persist even when cost information is presented alongside other information that might decrease aid support.

What's more, the rally seems to have caused a wage premium, pressuring employers to offer higher wages to offset potential employees' misgivings regarding Charlottesville, but this premium was lower when employers made pro-diversity claims.

This figure illustrates this main result (the paper presents the full-blown difference in differences)

I examine recruitment following the 2017 Unite the Right White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, showing how employers combated presumptions that they shared demonstrators’ anti-diversity positions by making countervailing pro-diversity claims in job postings.

I argue that firms trade silence for stance taking to countervail presumptions that they share political positions held by non-political actors with whom they are physically proximate but that are viewed unfavorably by their stakeholders.

Given that firms generally fare better by staying silent on divisive social issues, why do they sometimes speak up?

It goes both ways 😂 Just as political science research has a tendency to black-box businesses, management research often does that for politics. There is a lot of room for mutually beneficial trades.

cultivate ambiguous identities when victory requires attracting non-Evangelical voters. This was inspired by observations during 3 years I spent in Sao Paulo in my early 20s. Thanks to the @pspe_lse faculty for encouragement on this project's original iteration as my MSc thesis!

social groups, which will tend to be the case under less proportional rules and when their group is small. I examine the theory in the context of Brazilian municipal elections and show that office-seeking Evangelical clergy tend to

build broader, more diverse coalitions. I borrow logic from prior work around ambiguous policy platforms and formal models of electoral competition. Basically, candidates face greater incentive to cultivate ambiguous identities when victory requires attracting voters across

Prior work shows how candidates use group identity cues (related to race, religion, caste, tribe, etc.) to *reduce* ambiguity and attract in-group voters. I outline conditions under which candidates instead *increase* ambiguity around their identities in order to