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

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

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Between early March and 1 August 2020, COVID-19 took the lives of more than 150,000 Americans. Here, we examine the political consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic using granular data on COVID-19 fatalities and the attitudes of the American public. We find that COVID-19 has led to substantial damage for President Trump and other Republican candidates. States and local areas with higher levels of COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support President Trump and Republican candidates for House and Senate. Our results show that President Trump and other Republican candidates would benefit electorally from a reduction in COVID-19 fatalities. This implies that a greater emphasis on social distancing, masks, and other mitigation strategies would benefit the president and his allies.
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

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Differences between Democrats and Republicans in rates of wearing a mask to stop the spread of COVID-19 are associated with the partisan balance of a neighborhood. The difference in rates grew larger as the share of Republicans in a neighborhood increased. This finding appears to be driven by decreased rates of mask wearing by Republicans who live among increasing numbers of Republicans (and not by Democrats in the same neighborhood). Theories about social pressure suggest these findings may be driven by the politicized and publicly observable nature of wearing a mask relative to other COVID-19 mitigation strategies, like vaccination. Neighborhood partisan composition was only weakly related to uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine and unrelated to uptake of flu vaccines. Does local partisan context influence the adoption of prosocial behavior? Using a nationwide survey of 60,000 adults and geographic data on over 180 million registered voters, we investigate whether neighborhood partisan composition affects a publicly observable and politicized behavior: wearing a mask. We find that Republicans are less likely to wear masks in public as the share of Republicans in their zip codes increases. Democratic mask wearing, however, is unaffected by local partisan context. Consequently, the partisan gap in mask wearing is largest in Republican neighborhoods, and less apparent in Democratic areas. These effects are distinct from other contextual effects such as variations in neighborhood race, income, or education. In contrast, partisan context has significantly reduced influence on unobservable public health recommendations like COVID-19 vaccination and no influence on nonpoliticized behaviors like flu vaccination, suggesting that differences in mask wearing reflect the publicly observable and politicized nature of the behavior instead of underlying differences in dispositions toward medical care.