Welcome! I am an associate professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. I use quantitative and computational methods to study the relationship between digital media and politics.
Please see the Papers page for more information about my research, which explores questions such as:
I’m also a founding co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, with Kevin Munger and Eszter Hargittai. You can read our essay introducing the journal’s philosophy and goals here.
Despite the increasing popularity of podcasts as a source of news for many Americans, little is known about their precise impact. We conduct a mobile field experiment that examines how consumption of trustworthy news via daily podcasts affects attitudes about politics and the media over a one-week period. Our treatment, deployed at the end of the first of two survey waves, asks subjects to subscribe to a specific high-quality daily news podcast, NPR’s Up First. In addition, treated subjects are asked to turn on mobile push notifications for the podcast. The intervention successfully increased participants’ consumption of news from the podcast, with minimal substitution from other programs. We find that podcast consumption significantly increased event knowledge (d = 0.29), but only for topics covered in that week’s episodes. Trust specifically in news from podcasts also increased (d = 0.09), but not in mainstream news more generally. Our results shed light on outcomes linked to the unique possibilities of this medium and, more broadly, on the malleability of attitudes toward the media.