In 2010, our definition of democracy in America was drastically changed by the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. The Court ruled that under the First Amendment, corporations have the right to free speech. The decision removed the final ban on corporations, which prohibited corporate money used for direct advocacy. The consequences of this have been tremendous. The decision has allowed for the creation and rise of Super PACs and political active nonprofits. As a result, Super PACs and nonprofits now act as “shadow campaigns”. Outside groups have the ability to engage in voter suppression tactics without politically hurting the candidate. Unlike political candidates, there are no direct ramifications for an outside organization to get caught engaging in voter suppression. They are not held accountable by anyone. The ability to take political action that is independent from the government or campaigns allows for a new form of corruption. Corruption is no longer a coordinated act between corporate money and a candidate, but rather political actions that take place outside the public sphere. Political actions that take place in the private sphere are outside the realm of political accountability. The people stand powerless against private outside organizations.

In 2010, our definition of democracy in America was drastically changed by the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. FEC. The Court ruled that under the First Amendment, corporations have the right to free speech. The decision removed the final ban on corporations, which prohibited corporate money used for direct advocacy. The consequences of this have been tremendous. The decision has allowed for the creation and rise of Super PACs and political active nonprofits. As a result, Super PACs and nonprofits now act as “shadow campaigns”. Outside groups have the ability to engage in voter suppression tactics without politically hurting the candidate. Unlike political candidates, there are no direct ramifications for an outside organization to get caught engaging in voter suppression. They are not held accountable by anyone. The ability to take political action that is independent from the government or campaigns allows for a new form of corruption. Corruption is no longer a coordinated act between corporate money and a candidate, but rather political actions that take place outside the public sphere. Political actions that take place in the private sphere are outside the realm of political accountability. The people stand powerless against private outside organizations.

This paper seeks to understand the persistence of disenfranchisement policies and the disproportionate impact these policies have on marginalized groups of the American electorate, specifically black Americans. Felon disenfranchisement, or the restriction of voting rights for criminals convicted of felonies, has been a long-standing policy throughout the United States. Using public opinion data from the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), this paper analyzes how certain characteristics, such as race, age, and political party identification, can influence opinions about democratic rights and whether criminals should lose theirs once convicted. The results of this analysis could help explain why disenfranchisement policies have persisted throughout U.S. history, especially if these policies have consistently high levels of support from the general public.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in instances of Republican-dominated state legislatures proposing changes to election law that some see as protecting electoral integrity and others understand as intended to suppress votes of traditionally Democratic constituencies. This thesis is a detailed collection of the rationales used to justify these changes, as examined through a case study of North Carolina’s enactment of the omnibus Voter Information Verification Act of 2013 (VIVA). By also including the arguments proffered during the legislative process by opponents of the law, and after evaluating the merits of the arguments on both sides, I find the rationales used to justify the law’s provisions to be unconvincing and misleading. This study confirms the speculation that new election law restrictions are first and foremost a Republican attempt to gain partisan advantage. Given this conclusion, I offer suggestions as to what factors might eventually shift the current era of election law legislation from one of restrictions, to one focused on creating efficient, accessible, modernized electoral systems that inspire citizen confidence regardless of partisanship.

In many economic applications, a collective outcome experienced by a group of people is determined by individual decisions made by its constituents. Hence, understanding how individuals make decisions in group settings is important, but empirical and observational analyses are often complicated by confounding factors. This dissertation contains three essays that use controlled experiments designed to isolate, and measure the impact of, mechanisms predicted to affect behavior. Chapter 1 studies behavior under digital anonymity. A distinctive feature of the digital world is the ability to calibrate or withhold one's identifier: a person can be identified by a string of letters, an avatar, their real name, or even nothing at all. That digital identifiers allow a person to mask their physical identity also makes it difficult to attribute digital actions to a physical person, even when the actions are observed. I embed these features in an experiment where subjects play a finitely repeated, linear public goods game. Treated subjects are identified in one of three ways—by their photograph, by a random number, or by a self-designed cartoon avatar—and their individual choices are revealed and either attributed to, or decoupled from, their identifier. In line with the previous literature, identifying subjects and increasing the precision of attribution increases contributions relative to a baseline condition without identifiers or revealed individual choices. Remarkably, however, the largest impact on behavior comes from having an identifier in the first place: for a given level of attribution, the experimental data suggest that being identified by a number or by an avatar is as powerful as being identified by one's photograph. Chapter 2 studies whether and how individuals imbue digital avatars with self image and social image considerations. While digital avatars have become more commonplace and sophisticated, they need not resemble the physical appearance of the person using it. This inconsistency raises the question of how an avatar induces image considerations, relative to a person's physical appearance. I embed avatars into a dictator game and conduct two experiments, one addressing self image and the other social image. The direction of the treatment effect in the dictator game for both experiments suggests that individuals do attach image considerations to their avatars, though the effects are not statistically significant. Additionally, I find that subjects create significantly more positively perceived avatars when they know that their avatar will be shown to another subject who will decide how to allocate an endowment with them. Chapter 3, joint with Alessandra Casella and Michelle Jiang, studies the impact of an alternative voting system on the minority's turnout and resultant victories. We start from the observation that under majoritarian election systems, securing participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is Cumulative Voting (CV): each voter has as many votes as open positions and can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Theory predicts that CV encourages the minority to overcome obstacles to voting: although each voter is treated equally, CV increases minority's turnout relative to the majority, and the minority's share of seats won. A lab experiment based on a costly voting design strongly supports both predictions. Chapter 3 was published in Volume 141 of Games and Economic Behavior, pp. 133-155, September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2023.05.012.

More Americans voted in the 2020 elections than in any other in 120 years, and the majority supported the Democratic candidate - Joseph R. Biden, Jr. In 2020, Biden won 26 states, including Arizona, where he won as the first Democrat in the presidential elections since 1996. With a small margin of only 10,457 votes, every vote was essential. In Arizona, 412,256 people identify as American Indian and Alaska Native and their support for the Democratic candidate proved to be decisive in the 2020 elections. However, only little has been written about American Indians and Alaska Natives and their voting habits. Existing studies suffer from examining only one tribe or state, are old or ambiguous. American Indians and Alaska Natives are also often excluded from collecting and reporting data, and when included, the data is either inaccurate or put them in "the other" category. This work is the first to examine Native American voting in the 2020 presidential election. It aims to prove that the Native vote was one of the aspects that helped Biden win the elections since Native Americans traditionally support the Democratic candidates. To prove my thesis, I compared the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections from the precincts overlapping with tribal lands in Arizona and conducted a quantitative analysis of...

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<p>  </p> <p>We cannot fully assess the normative and epistemic implications of online discourse, especially political discourse, without recognizing how it is being systematically leveraged to undermine the credibility and autonomy of those with marginalized identities. In the following chapters, I supplement social/feminist epistemological methodologies with norm theory to argue that online discourse entrenches the mechanisms of political dominance and cultural hegemony by ignoring and devaluing the experiences and struggles of marginalized individuals. Each chapter investigates a different, concrete manifestation of this dynamic. In Chapter 1, I argue that digital capitalist enterprises like Facebook facilitate the targeting of minoritized users with disproportionate instances of abuse, misinformation, and silencing. This is exemplified by the practice of using racial microtargeting to engage in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) voter suppression. I contend in Chapter 2 that, given the exploitative nature of racially-microtargeted political advertising campaigns, these social media companies are ultimately morally responsible for initiating and sustaining a burgeoning digital voter suppression industry. In Chapter 3, I argue that the presence of online disinformation, in tandem with key party figures’ explicit endorsement of vicious group epistemic norms like close-mindedness and dogmatism, have directly contributed to the formation and epistemic isolation of conservative political factions in the US. Finally, I argue in Chapter 4 that social media and hostile media bias rhetoric directly reinforce sexist and racist credibility norms, effectively creating a toxic environment of misogynistic online discourse that hurts the perceived credibility of women journalists.</p>