Ryan Baxter-King

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.

I study how real-world events interact with voters’ partisan attachments to shape elections and public opinion in the United States. In particular, my research focuses on those voters who live closest to focusing events, are exposed to salient policy changes, and or whose local communities experience worsening policy outcomes.

My dissertation focuses on one type of event, mass shootings, and examines whether these salient events affect voters’ political attitudes and behavior. This research applies rigorous causal inference techniques to large-scale survey data and administrative databases while using a survey experiment to test specific mechanisms and scope conditions. This dissertation work is supported by a $15,000 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Rapoport Family Foundation. I am also a member of the Practical Causal Inference Lab.

My job market paper, “The Effect of Real-World Event on Political Attitudes and Preference Intensity: Evidence from Mass Shootings” is available here.

More broadly, I am interested in electoral accountability, political participation, and policy feedback – especially when these questions intersect with public health. I have experience collaborating across disciplinary boundaries, including with researchers in medicine, public health, and psychology. I am currently part of the UCLA Health and Politics Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between social scientists and medical doctors at UCLA and Harvard. I have also published collaborative work with researchers at the Centers for Disease Control.

Prior to graduate school, I worked at the AIDS Institute (New York State Department of Health) in the Office of the Medical Director, and at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the Department of Strategy and Innovation.

My CV is available here. The syllabus for a course that I developed and taught in 2022 and 2024, “Health, Politics, and Culture: Medicare and Medicaid Policy,” is also available.

selected publications

  1. Sci. Adv.
    Fatalities from COVID-19 are reducing Americans’ support for Republicans at every level of federal office
    Warshaw, Christopher, Vavreck, Lynn, and Baxter-King, Ryan
    Science Advances 2020
  2. PNAS
    How local partisan context conditions prosocial behaviors: Mask wearing during COVID-19
    Baxter-King, Ryan, Brown, Jacob R., Enos, Ryan D., Naeim, Arash, and Vavreck, Lynn
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2022