Welcome! My name is Chagai Weiss. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization Lab at Stanford University. I defended my dissertation at the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in summer 2022, after spending two years as a Middle East Initiative predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
My core interest is in examining how institutions and the people within them shape intergroup relations in divided societies. I am also working on several projects examining the effects of scalable interventions for prejudice reduction, the electoral effects of conflict, the institutional origins of partisan polarization, and experimental methods. My research has been published or is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals.
I co-coordinate the Intergroup Relations Workshop — a virtual workshop which meets periodically to provide feedback on political science and social psychology research relating to intergroup relations.
Books
-
Abstraction in Experimental Design: Testing the Tradeoffs.
(with Ryan Brutger, Joshua Kertzer and Jonathan Renshon). Cambridge University
Press, Elements in Experimental Political Science series. 2022.
[Overview]
In our book we explore the consequences of abstraction and detail in experimental design and innovate both theoretically and empirically. We offer an overarching
conceptual framework outlining three different dimensions of abstraction implicated
in experimental design: situational hypotheticality, actor identity, and contextual detail. We then test our theoretical framework by fielding eight survey experiments manipulating levels of abstraction
along our three theorized dimensions. Doing so, we explore how experimental
results change when varying different levels of abstraction in experimental stimuli.
-
Prejudice Reduction at Scale: How Institutional Inclusion Reduces Social Exclusion. In progress.
[Overview]
Publications
-
Group Gender Composition
and Perceptions of Legitimacy. (With Kristen Kao, Ellen Lust, and Marwa Shalaby). Forthcoming,
American Political Science Review.
[Pre-analysis Plan]
[Replication Files]
-
Educating for Inclusion: Diversity Education
Programs can Reduce Prejudice towards Outgroups in Israel. 2023. (with Eran Halperin and Shira Ran). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Pre-analysis Plan I]
[Pre-analysis Plan II]
[Pre-Print]
[Replication Files]
[Israeli National TV (כאן) Newstory]
[Israeli National Radio (כאן) Feature]
-
Beliefs about Minority Representation in Policing
and Support for Diversification. 2022. (with Kyle Peyton and Paige Vaughn). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Pre-print]
[Replication Files]
-
War Time Military Service Can Affect Partisan Preferences. 2022. (with Anna Getmansky). Comparative Political Studies.
[Pre-print]
[Replication Files]
-
Atypical Violence and Conflict Dynamics: Evidence from Jerusalem. Forthcoming. (with Eugene Finkel, Yon Lupu, Dan Miodownik, and Neal Tsur). Political Science Research and Methods.
[Replication Files]
-
Interstate Conflict Can Reduce Support for Incumbents: Evidence from the Israeli Electorate and the Yom Kippur War. 2023. (with Anna Getmansky). Journal of Conflict Resolution.
[Replication Files]
-
How Threats of Exclusion Mobilize Palestinian Political Participation. Forthcoming.
(with Alexandra Siegel and David Romney). American Journal of Political Science.
[Pre-analysis Plan]
[Pre-print]
[Replication Files]
-
Abstraction and Detail in Experimental Design.
Forthcoming. (with Ryan Brutger, Joshua Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and Dustin Tingley). American Journal of Political Science.
[Pre-print]
[Replication Files]
-
Diversity in Health Care Institutions Reduces Israeli Patients’ Prejudice toward Arabs. 2021.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[Pre-analysis Plan]
[Replication Files]
-
Party Competition and Cooperation Shape Affective Polarization: Evidence from Natural and Survey Experiments in Israel. 2020. (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate)
Comparative Political Studies.
[Pre-print]
[Pre-analysis Plan]
[Replication Files]
[Scope Conditions Podcast]
[Monkey Cage Blog]
[בלוג המכון לחירות ואחריות]
-
Bureaucratic Politics and the Translation of Movement Agendas. 2019. (with Sharon Gilad and Saar)
Governance.
-
Geographies of violence in Jerusalem: The spatial logic of urban intergroup conflict. 2018.
(with Jonathan Rock and Dan Miodownik). Political Geography.
[Replication Files]
Working papers
-
Compulsory Military Service Reduces Affective Polarization: Evidence from Conscription Reforms in Europe.
-
Financial Market Exposure Increases Generalized Trust, Particularly Among the Politically Polarized. (with Saumitra Jha and Moses Shayo).
Stanford GSB Working Paper No 4083.
-
The Generalizability of IR Experiments Beyond the U.S. (with Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Jonathan Renshon, and Jessica Weeks).
Ongoing work
-
The Prevalence of Intergroup Avoidance Online and How it Can Be Reduced.
(with Alexandra Scacco and Alexandra Siegel)