Saikun Shi

Public Opinion vs President/Congress: Who's the Real Principal to Professionalized Government Agencies?
2024–25 American Democracy Fellowship
How does the government supervise and interfere with firm activities that could have profound implications to citizens’ welfare? Does visibility to the public influence government agencies’ decision to pursue certain cases under limited budget of labor and time? In turn, how does public opinion over professionalized government agencies form and change? How does these perspectives influence vote choices and policy preferences? Another angle: what are the incentives behind government agencies that are not elected by voters and are usually considered to be professionals or experts (e.g. lawyers, economists)? Do they want to showcase neutrality or do they conform to sitting government’s political leanings? Do they exert effort in a strategic way? Does the public react to these signals?
In the first part of the survey experiment, I want to understand how the public views firm activities and the role of government in these activities. Does the public view DOJ/FTC/FCC as professional or politicized agencies? Does such views relate to congruence between respondent and sitting government? What type of firm or deal characteristics are respondents are more likely to flag as expecting more government supervision? How does the public react to government actions? The second part of the survey would be directed to government staff members.
Conditional Democracy: How Partisan Electoral Concerns Shape Public Support for Expanding Voting Rights
2022–23 Survey Lab Project
How do perceived partisan and social ramifications of voting rights extensions affect public support for expanding the franchise? Through two original survey experiments, I find that partisan electoral concerns consistently and significantly influence Americans’ support for expanding the right to vote to citizens with previous felony convictions, non-citizens, and younger Americans. When respondents expect enfranchisement to benefit the opposite party, they are much less likely to support voting rights extensions. However, there is a striking asymmetry in such responses: support is virtually unchanged when enfranchisement is projected to benefit their own party versus when it is projected to be electorally neutral. Meanwhile, respondents from both political parties hold almost identical priors that the Democratic Party would very slightly benefit more from voting rights extensions. Together, the empirical patterns suggest that the mass public is mainly motivated by electoral threat when deciding whether to expand the franchise. My results provide valuable insights into the prospects for further voting rights expansions in the US, and imply that perceived electoral non-neutrality is a major obstacle to increasing democratic inclusion in this country.