Ryan Baxter-King

Assistant Professor of Political Science

The University of Nevada, Reno

Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, where I teach courses in American politics and quantitative methods for undergraduates, MPA students, and PhD students.

I received my Ph.D. in 2025 from the University of California, Los Angeles. I spent the 2024-2025 academic year as a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.

I study how people learn about politics. In particular, my research explores how salient events interact with voters’ partisan and social identities to shape elections and public opinion in the United States. I especially focus on voters who live closest to focusing events, who are exposed to salient policy changes, or whose local communities experience worsening policy outcomes.

Methodologically, I apply rigorous causal inference techniques to large-scale survey data and administrative databases while using survey experiments to test specific mechanisms and scope conditions. In order to understand the information environment around these events and policy outcomes, I apply natural language processing – including classical methods, embedding-based models, and large language models – to corpora of text including local newspaper articles.

My work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS Nexus, and Science Advances. I regularly collaborate with colleagues in public health, medicine, and public policy to study the intersection of health and politics. Past collaborations include the UCLA Health and Politics Project (2020 - 2024) and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I am also a member of the Practical Causal Inference Lab.

Prior to graduate school, I worked in the Office of the Medical Director at the AIDS Institute (New York State Department of Health) and on an analytics and data science team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

selected publications

PNAS

Local partisan context and mental health

Baxter-King, Ryan, Brown, Jacob R., Enos, Ryan D., Naeim, Arash, and Vavreck, Lynn

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2026

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We find that, relative to Republicans residing in more Republican neighborhoods, Republicans in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of Democratic residents report higher levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. While Democrats in general report worse mental health than Republicans, Democrats show no sensitivity to partisan context. Using a large-scale national survey and fine-grained data on residential political context, we establish that these patterns persist even when examining partisans who live in the same Zip Codes, and while controlling for other individual and geographic features. The correlation is strongest for the most strongly partisan individuals, suggesting that politics is a significant factor in the relationship. For Republicans, the size of the relationship between partisan context and mental health is comparable to or larger than the correlation between mental health reports and other contextual features of residential areas, such as neighborhood poverty or the way racial minorities respond to changes in the racial or ethnic composition of local geography.
Prev. Sci.

Gun-Related Beliefs as Predictors of Gun Policy Support: Findings from the Nationally Representative GRIP Survey

Ward, Julie A., Baxter-King, Ryan, Smith, Phillip N., and Mehari, Krista R.

Prevention Science 2026

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Partisan affiliations and other demographic characteristics inadequately explain support for gun policy and provide vague public health messaging guidance. Gun-related beliefs may be more malleable and meaningful determinants of policy support for gun violence prevention. Using a nationally representative, community-engaged, mixed methods design, we examined predictive associations between gun-related beliefs and public support for six gun policies (i.e., universal background checks, waiting periods, minimum purchasing age, violent offender prohibitions, concealed carry permits, and extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs)). Gun-related beliefs were more strongly associated with policy support than political affiliation. Strength of agreement with “no one should own AR-15 style semiautomatic rifles” was positively associated with support for all six policies. Beliefs about gun policies as violence prevention were also highly salient, predicting support for five policies, with disagreement or agreement both predicting higher probability of support for universal background checks, violent offender prohibitions, and ERPOs than neutral beliefs. Beliefs that “guns are tools” were generally unassociated with policy views. Findings suggest potential for gun violence prevention messages that combine values-based language with salient themes to build support for preventive policies across political and demographic lines.
PNAS Nexus

Endorsements vs. information: Experimental evidence of backlash and parallel persuasion during the COVID-19 public health crisis

Baxter-King, Ryan, Coppock, Alexander, Straus, Graham, and Vavreck, Lynn

PNAS Nexus 2025

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Governments try to promote prosocial behaviors like gun safety, environmental protection, opioid awareness, and during COVID-19 pandemic, behaviors like social distancing, masking, and vaccination. Democratic governments generally cannot force these behaviors on citizens; instead, they must persuade. Persuasive appeals mainly fall into three categories: endorsements (cues from leaders, experts, or celebrities), guidance and mandates (policies or practices issued by government), and information (the provision of facts and arguments about benefits). Using data from 10 experiments with 85,191 survey respondents conducted over a 2-year period during the COVID-19 pandemic, we assess the effectiveness of these three types of persuasive messages. We find that endorsements are variously polarizing depending on subjects’ partisan orientation toward the endorser, counterproductive in general, or wholly ineffective. We find that guidance and information treatments—when they are effective at all—move people “in parallel,” i.e. in the direction of information by similar amounts regardless of party affiliation.
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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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.
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.

public engagement

Research

The Economist, "Why lonely Republicans are even glummer than Democrats," August 2026.
The New York Times (The Upshot), "How Local COVID Deaths Are Affecting Vote Choice," July 2020.

Current Events

The Nevada Independent, "Ads say Aaron Ford isn't doing enough to stop Medicaid fraud. Here's what we found," August 2026.
Reno Gazette Journal, "Mail ballots, high-profile races boost Nevada early voting turnout," June 2026.