Browsing by Author "Incantalupo, Matthew"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Asian Racialization of U.S. Public Policy: How the “model-minority” myth colors white Americans’ political attitudes toward Asian Americans
    (2018) Yoon, Handeul Hanna; Incantalupo, Matthew
    This thesis project studies the formation of Americans’ political attitudes under the influence of prominent racial stereotypes. This research examines a new, understudied non-white group and relevant stereotypes: Asian Americans and the model-minority myth (respectively) which labels Asian Americans as high-achieving, economically successful, hard-working, and responsible citizens. I use an original survey experiment to answer the question, “What effects does the ‘model minority’ myth have on the racialization of public policy in the United States and how does this inform white Americans’ attitudes toward immigration, welfare, and education?” Asian Americans are the largest-growing immigrant group in the United States yet are not often found in political discourse regarding immigration policy, regardless also of the fact that 1 in 8 undocumented immigrants are Asian (López et al. 2017). Within this large immigrant group, there are accordingly large inequalities in income and wealth (often separated by ethnicity) yet discussion around welfare is not reflective of this. Instead, the model-minority myth paints Asian Americans as one stereotype, which has harmful effects as it ignores the policy needs of Asian Americans. I use the deservingness criteria and the work ethic theory to measure specific factors that affect political attitude formation. I hypothesize white Americans will have positive attitudes toward Asian immigrants because they are seen as hard-working and high-skilled. Based on attitude, reciprocity, and identity, whites will have positive attitudes toward welfare policy. Whites will have negative attitudes toward Asians on welfare based on need and control because the model-minority myth illustrates Asians as a low-need group with economic success. I gather data from 1,224 respondents through a survey administered via Qualtrics. All participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, which collected responses nationwide. Survey questions to measure policy attitudes include four-point agree/disagree statements and vignettes where the subject in question was randomized by race. Overall, the data shows white Americans have lots of sympathy for non-white groups they see having a high work ethic. First, respondents generally show most positive responses toward Asian Americans and Asian immigrants relative to the “white” and non-white, non-Asian groups. Second, respondents have significantly more sympathetic attitudes toward Asians the more they view Asians according to the model-minority myth. In other words, the model-minority myth had a significant influence on respondents’ attitudes toward welfare and immigration policies. Although respondents largely agree Asian Americans seem economically successful and have low-need for government aid, they also agreed an Asian mother on welfare was deserving of the government support. The key takeaway of this thesis is that the model minority myth is tangible and has measurable implications for whites’ attitudes pertaining to Asian Americans. In other words, the data support the hypothesis that the model-minority myth holds unique racializing effects on white Americans’ political attitudes. The results from this study can lend to future research about how public media portrayal of different racial groups in America shape the way Americans form attitudes toward certain public policy areas and might influence the way Americans vote for public policies.
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    Determinants of Attitudes Towards Immigrants in Denmark
    (2016) Hafner, Thomas; Incantalupo, Matthew
    This paper explores how attitudes towards immigrants are shaped in Denmark. While other studies have looked at this issue in other countries, to my knowledge there has not been a study on this issue in Denmark. With a changing population and contested views on immigration, Denmark is an ideal country for looking at the effects of immigration. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), I attempt to examine what factors contribute the most to the formation of attitudes towards immigration in Denmark, and why these factors are important. The results show that education has a significant effect in shaping attitudes, but it is difficult to determine whether this is due to economic or cultural reasons. Other factors such as income, religion and gender also appear to affect attitudes towards immigration, but the results for these variables are not as conclusive as education.
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    Morphing Pressure into Success or Failure
    (2016) Taylor, Winful; Incantalupo, Matthew; Preston, Anne Elizabeth
    Pressure can lead some to excellence, or cause others to underperform. In this paper, I seek to explain whether pressure negatively or positively affects a college basketball player’s performance at the free-throw line, late in close games. With over a million observations of male college basketball free throws obtained from data scraped from ESPN.com (Toma, 2015), this paper analyzes how these college athletes perform in a pressurized scenario. Using player fixed effects, results show that during these pressurized periods, players shoot worse free throw percentages. Using OLS and player fixed effects, results show that male college basketball players shot worse by 1.6 percentage points. Additionally, upon interaction, results also show that players drafted into the National Basketball Association shot worse by 5.9 percentage points at the free throw line.
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    Post-Secondary Income Inequality in America
    (2016) Hart, Ben; Incantalupo, Matthew
    Significant research has been dedicated to examining the relationship between education and earnings. It has, for some time, been established that attending an institution of higher education increases earnings relative to not attending one. This increase in earnings is thought to help reduce income inequality and, even former secretary of education, Arne Duncan, proclaimed education to be “the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture and privilege.” However, research has been limited in examining the earnings of students that attend the same school but come from different socio-economic backgrounds. This paper shows that there is a 20% difference in earnings among higher and lower income Title IV students (students that completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and looks for characteristics of schools that have minimized that difference. The findings show that schools that provide more institutional grant aid are associated with a relatively minimized difference in earnings among Title IV students coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. Ultimately, the findings show that income inequality is in strong effect even among students with similar academic characteristics and slightly different socio-economic backgrounds.
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    Social Identity vs. Rational Choice: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Political Preferences
    (2016) Baxter-King, Ryan; Incantalupo, Matthew; Oberfield, Zachary W.
    This thesis contributes to the literature on voters’ preferences for political candidates. The experimental design of the study controls for voters’ use of social identity as an information shortcut to inferring candidates’ policy views. I evaluate the evidence for two theories of voter choice: rational choice theory, which suggests that voters’ preferences are issue-based, and social identity theory, which argues that individuals vote for members of their social group. Using two experiments, I analyze these theories with respect to gender and race. I find strong support for rational choice theory and subgroup-dependent support for social identity theory.
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    The Effect of Medical Marijuana on Crime Rates
    (2017) Garrison, Kenna; Incantalupo, Matthew
    Support for medical and recreational marijuana legalization is on the rise, with more than half of states having passed medical marijuana laws, and recent polls showing the majority of the U.S. in support of legalization (Marijuana Policy Project, 2016). While critics of these laws often claim that they will lead to more crime, supporters assert the opposite- that allowing legal sale of marijuana would decrease crime by shrinking the illegal drug market. Previous research has analyzed the effects of the implementation of medical marijuana laws on crime rates, but this paper is the first to study how the size of the medical marijuana market affects crime rates. By using the medical marijuana patient registration rates across states from 1995 to 2015, I use a difference-in-differences approach to find that a one percent increase in medical marijuana registration rates decreases murder and robbery rates by 0.03% and 0.02%, respectively, and has no significant effect on other types of crime. These results show that increasing the legal availability of marijuana through medicalization could decrease murder and robbery rates, two crimes highly associated with the illegal drug trade.
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    The Effect of Terrorism on Travel: United States and Europe
    (2017) Villanueva, Yannick; Incantalupo, Matthew
    By constructing panel data sets of air, road and rail travel in the United States and Western Europe, and merging them with data on terrorist attacks, this study suggests that there is a need for a shift towards the comprehensive analysis of the behavioral responses to terrorism. This study provides new evidence that the 9/11 attacks resulted in people substituting air travel for rail travel in addition to road travel. Most attacks on airports and airplanes do not reduce air travel or increase road travel but do result in a marginal decrease in air fare, which leads to higher levels of air travel and lower levels of road travel. This suggests that people are more responsive to lower prices than higher risks of terrorism.
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    Virtual Tribalism: The Effect of Social Media on Political Polarization.
    (2018) Tomares, Daniel Isaac; Incantalupo, Matthew
    The existence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit has allowed for increasing and global interconnectivity of both social interaction and news consumption. This thesis explores the formation of self-segregation ideological communities online called echo chambers, and their potential role in worsening elite polarization in modern American politics. Through a literature review concerning the role of expanding media choice, media effects, and social pressures in shaping political behavior, and a multi-month case study of an online echo chamber, this thesis concludes that social media websites are an influence worth consideration.
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    When States Turn on Their People: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar and Sudan
    (2018) Pence, Chris; Incantalupo, Matthew
    The current refugee crisis of Burmese Rohingya is a shockingly violent modern example of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Myanmar’s military. It brings new attention to the question of why a government would violently expel an ethnic group from its territory. By comparing the case of Myanmar with the well-documented case of ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003-4, this thesis presents a theory of conditions that lead governments to commit ethnic cleansing on their own populations. The cases of ethnic cleansing in Sudan (2003-4) and Myanmar (2017) were orchestrated by their governments and led to massive violence against and displacement of specific ethnic groups. Both were responses to attacks against the government by rebel groups in peripheral regions with long histories of ethnic conflict (Beech 2017; Crilly 2010). In Darfur, as many as 400,000 were killed and 2.5 million displaced (Crilly 2010). The case of Myanmar is quite recent to make accurate estimates for the number killed, but MSF surveys suggest at least 6,700 were killed “in the most conservative estimations” (Médecins Sans Frontieres 2017). According to satellite images, 354 villages have been burned, and over 647,000 have fled to camps in Bangladesh since August 2017 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2018; Human Rights Watch 2017). The Sudanese government used militias of Arab ethnic groups to carry out much of the violent campaign which targeted black Africans(Flint and De Waal 2008) while in Myanmar the army led the violence against the largely Muslim Rohingya ethnic group, with only limited support from militias of other ethnic groups, mainly Buddhists(Rowlatt 2017). In both cases, the perpetrators used torture and rape as weapons of war. Civilians, including women, children and the elderly, were not spared from the violence. First, this thesis summarizes relevant literature on ethnic cleansing. It first addresses theories of ethnic conflict, noting convergence among some scholars that such conflict is most often incited by political elites – “ethnic entrepreneurship” – rather than by “primordial” explanations that see conflict as inevitable due to the content or history of the differences between groups (Wimmer 2008; Posner 2004; Brubaker 2004). This focuses our attention in the two cases here on how government and ethnic elites used their power to incite conflict and violence, ultimately leading to ethnic cleansing. The section then discusses studies and theories on the relationship between democratization and ethnic cleansing, particularly of interest to the case of Myanmar which is undergoing a (far from complete) democratic transition. I note a convincing theory that democratization often leads to greater incentives for ethnic entrepreneurship, which in turn leads to increased ethnic conflict (Snyder 2000). After giving more background on ethnic politics in Sudan and Myanmar, this thesis presents a novel theory of government-led ethnic cleansing that attempts to explain in more detail the circumstances that lead governments to ethnically cleanse their own people. The theory finds two necessary but insufficient conditions for ethnic cleansing: a socially-constructed definition of the nation that excludes an ethnic group, and a perception on the part of the government that the ethnic group poses a threat to its rule. The theory also presents three contributory variables that increase the likelihood of ethnic cleansing: authoritarian rule or unconsolidated democracy, a history of military rule, and a weak state. Finally, the theory suggests that colonialism leads to the contributory variables in the country even long after it gains independence, putting countries with a history as a colonial holding at greater risk for ethnic cleansing. I then offer evidence from the two cases to support the various parts of the theory, finding substantial evidence for all aspects except for the impact democratization has on the cases. Neither case has strong enough democratic institutions to know whether the opinions of the populous had a significant impact on the decisions made by political elites, and neither has strong liberal norms of personal rights. Thus, any assertion for what might have occurred with stronger democratic institutions would be conjecture. Future research could resolve this by studying cases of ethnic conflict in democracies, with a focus on how the democratic institutions relate to the use violence or lack thereof (Snyder and Mann are two valuable contributions in this vein (Snyder 2000; Mann 1999)). The seventh section concludes with a review of the key findings, limitations of the study, implications of the findings, and areas for future research. I suggest that efforts to prevent ethnic cleansing should pay particular attention to ethnic conflict in states with weak democratic institutions, histories of military rule and/or weak states. I also propose that such efforts should work to reduce these three factors in countries at risk for ethnic violence.