Academic Projects

Despite growing interest in climate change-induced migration, we lack empirical evidence of climate change’s impacts in shaping migration preferences in highly vulnerable countries. To address this gap, we employ a novel, large-N survey, the first to sample from nearly every small-island state and territory in the world across the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean. We propose a theoretical framework to understand the role of climate impacts in shaping migration intent, emphasizing objective/subjective vulnerability, time horizons, and adaptation policies. Using an embedded experiment, we find that while offering hypothetical legal support for migration strengthens desire to migrate, providing hypothetical financial resources has the opposite effect. Additionally, future expectation of climate harm is more strongly associated with desire to migrate than past experiences, and exposure to adaptation policies is a weak predictor of the same. These findings contribute to the growing literature on climate mobility among those most vulnerable to displacement.

Over the coming decades, millions of people around the world will be displaced by climate change. Despite the potential scale of this change in migration patterns, relatively little is known about public preferences toward these prospective migrants. Drawing on a large public opinion sample in ten countries representing the top carbon-emitters in both the Global North and South, this paper offers experimental evidence of the effects of linking these migrants’ displacement explicitly to climate change. I find that prospective migrants who have been forced from their homes due to climate change are seen as meriting admission more highly than economic migrants, and on par with migrants fleeing persecution, the only criterion currently included in most legal definitions of who qualifies for humanitarian admissions as refugees or asylees. I also test ways in which public opinion on climate migration is shaped by the interaction between the public’s immigration attitudes and their climate change opinions through the process of issue linkage. The findings in this study suggest that public opinion barriers to developing expanded and differentiated admissions streams for climate-displaced people may be lower that previously thought, a finding with live policy implications as governments consider how they will manage the migration effects of a rapidly changing climate.

As climate change displaces millions worldwide, possible receiving countries face mounting pressure to develop policy responses for this emerging class of migrants. Political scientists have only recently begun to investigate how climate change as a migration driver may alter the politics of immigration policymaking. In an era of restrictive immigration policy and with climate-displaced people lacking dedicated admissions pathways, what are the prospects for expansionary policy? We argue that targeted policy instruments such as a special humanitarian visa for climate migrants can garner public support even amid broader anti-immigration sentiment (as in our study’s context, on the eve of Donald Trump’s second inauguration). We theorize that information linking climate change and migration leads many voters to view climate-induced migration as inevitable, shifting preferences toward orderly management rather than restriction. We test this through an experiment with 3,095 US registered voters, introducing a novel measurement strategy that overcomes limitations of traditional immigration opinion surveys such as voters’ innumeracy over immigration levels. Respondents allocate up to 1,000 hypothetical visas across different migrant categories, allowing them to express both restrictive/expansionary preferences (by allocating many, few or even zero visas) and while also enabling relative prioritization across migrant classes. We find that information about climate-induced displacement significantly increases support for admitting climate migrants, with treated respondents allocating 20-22% of visas to this group, compared to 16\% in the control condition, a 25-35% increase over baseline preferences. Remarkably, this expansionary effect holds across virtually all ideological and partisan subgroups, including climate skeptics. These findings suggest that targeted, expansionary humanitarian immigration policies (an expansionary port in a restrictive storm) are possible even in policy environments where expansionary immigration policy is difficult.

Commentary in the wake of several recent elections across multiple democracies has suggested that voters no longer care about climate change, and that parties that pursue aggressive climate policies face a backlash at the ballot box. For this to be true, it would require that there is a group of voters who hold strong anti-climate preferences, and for whom this is a highly salient issue. But existing measures of issue importance and preferences fail to capture these voters. I am currently developing and piloting several ways to measure these concepts and develop a two-dimensional score to identify these voters and measure their impact in elections.

This project is a unique inter-disciplinary collaboration between engineers and social scientists. Using survey data collected using a geographically fine-grained mail-to-web survey methodology, we measure current adoption of household electrification technologies as part of the clean energy transition. We model present and future adoption at the census-tract level using multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) and model impacts on the electricity grid under multiple adoption scenarios.

This project uses multi-wave surveys across the US to elicit preferences over local large-scale solar generation infrastructure. We construct a unique, geographically fine-grained sampling frame, and employ mail-to-web survey methodology to collect rich measures of attitudes and preferences.

We conduct post-election surveys (all national elections, as they arise) in advanced industrialized democracies tracking changes in the issue salience of climate change as well as attitudes toward (and preferences over) policies related to the clean energy transition.

My contributions to this project focus on collecting original cross-national survey data (12-15 countries) as part of a multi-method approach to measuring the prospects for pro-climate and pro-clean energy transition policies in democracies around the world.

Many influential studies of public preferences on immigration employ a survey measure that asks the public whether they would prefer the number of immigrants be increased, decreased, or stay the same. How should we interpret this measure when study after study tells us that the public is largely innumerate when it comes to the number of migrants admitted annually. Drawing on experimental methods from the economics and marketing literature, I adapt and employ a number of incentive-compatible “willingness-to-pay” (WTP) preference elicitation methods, resulting in a novel and more conceptually valid measure of public preferences on immigration levels.