Correspondence audits document causal evidence of racial/ethnic discrimination in many contexts. However, few studies have examined whether local political party voting context influences individuals to engage in "stakeholder-centric" discrimination on behalf of or in response to expectations of others. We examine heterogeneity in…

Over several decades, a greater share of the expense of earning a college degree has shifted to students and their families as appropriations to public institutions of higher education have declined as a percentage of the overall cost to educate a student. Tuition has greatly outpaced inflation during this period, while inflation-adjusted…

With the rise in popularity of social media and e-commerce platforms, "discrete math" is at the heart of our online experiences, playing a front-end role in the recommendation of what to click, watch, or buy, or who to follow or friend, as well as a back-end role in data storage, access, and transfer. This thesis focuses on two such…

Scholars and legal practitioners of voting rights are concerned with estimating individual-level voting behavior from aggregate-level data. The most commonly used technique, King's ecological inference (EI), has been questioned for inflexibility in multiethnic settings or with multiple candidates. One method for estimating vote support for…

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting. The authors looked the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. The…

Many college students are motivated to vote in presidential elections. Like most Americans, however, they are far less likely to vote in elections for local officeholders. Often this is because they have little to no information about the candidates. Starting in 2020, with university support, the author and a colleague began providing nonpartisan…

The 1971 passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution was a significant step in advancing voting rights that offered a new route for young people to participate in public life. While met with enthusiasm in many quarters, the question of where a substantial segment of the youth vote--college students--would cast their ballots was a…

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need to conduct synchronous online instruction in which students and faculty were distributed geographically but aggregated digitally onto a single screen on a computer. This approach will likely persist into the future. Thus, a better understanding of how engagement approaches can be adapted to…

Pundits, politicians, and academics have long worried about potentially low rates of civic participation among STEM-oriented students. Does studying STEM actually decrease the odds that young people will be actively involved in democracy? To answer this question, we created a dataset of over 23 million students in the United States, matched to…

This is a study of 12,372 professors in 116 colleges that are the four top US News-ranked colleges in each of 30 states that collect political registration data. We devised the sample to highlight variation in registration arising from individual, college-level, and state-level characteristics. We find an overall Democratic-to-Republican…

Political polarization in the United States is not a recent phenomenon. States are now often described as "red" or "blue" based on how voters predominately voted in the Presidential and other statewide elections. These differences now seem to have generated into values considerations oriented around social characteristics and…

With the world growing in complexity and interconnectedness, the demand for leaders equipped to solve compound problems will only increase. Higher education is called upon to develop leadership in students and needs to engage relevant tools and techniques to prepare students for the tasks ahead. Democratic engagement--from voter education and…

Although voting is a fundamental mechanism through which Americans engage with their democracy, social workers often do not see it as a valid component of practice. Voting is an important source of political power and provides a means to ensure equitable representation. Educating social work students on how they can encourage voter engagement…

The case for the use of simulations in political science seminars to provide illustrative learning of complex political process has been well demonstrated across a variety of sub-disciplines within political science. Their value to the teaching of European Union politics has also been explored and is particularly valuable for the EU's numerous…

"The Civic Outlook of Young Adults in America" is a first-of-its-kind national survey of 18-24-year-old Americans that sheds light on their civic knowledge, civic engagement, and commitment to democracy. Part of a multi-year research initiative to measure holistic youth civic preparedness in America, Citizens & Scholars commissioned…