Research
Publications
- The Politics of Small Business OwnersNeil Malhotra, Yotam Margalit, and Saikun ShiBritish Journal of Political Science, 2025
Small business owners play a central role in all advanced economies. Nonetheless, they are an understudied occupational group politically, particularly compared to groups that represent smaller portions of the population such as union members and manufacturing workers. In this study, we conduct a detailed investigation of the politics of small business owners and offer new insight into the evolving role of education, class, and occupation in electoral politics. Leveraging diverse sources of data is not - representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its kind, bespoke survey of small business owners - we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties. We find that this tendency cannot be fully explained by factors that cause people to select into being small business owners. Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.
- The Policy Feedback Effects of State Assistance: Did Small Business Bailouts Increase Support for Public Aid Programs?Neil Malhotra, and Saikun ShiJournal of Experimental Political Science, 2026
We examine whether exposure to government assistance can generate positive policy feedback effects among constituencies not traditionally supportive of the welfare state. Focusing on the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a small business bailout enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how making government assistance salient affects attitudes toward social assistance programs among a typically Republican-leaning and relatively affluent group. Leveraging a bespoke survey of verified program recipients and an embedded experimental manipulation, we find that reminding PPP recipients of program participation increases support for government spending on healthcare, nutritional assistance, and unemployment benefits by an average of 6.9 percentage points—equivalent to roughly 16 percent of the partisan divide on these issues. The findings provide novel causal evidence that making the receipt of government assistance salient increases support for anti-poverty programs among well-off people, even when those programs do not directly benefit them.
Working Papers
- Accountability in the Technocratic State: Public Opinion and Regulatory Enforcement in AntitrustSaikun ShiJob Market Paper
Can citizens hold the technocratic state accountable when partisan cues offer little guidance? I study this question through antitrust enforcement, a domain governing trillions in economic activity yet rarely central to partisan debate. Using a survey experiment, I show citizens form systematic merger preferences from economically intuitive signals: deal size, industry overlap, and familiarity. Notably, revealing that a firm owns well-known brands increases support for intervention rather than generating leniency, an effect operating primarily through perceptions of acquiror corporate scale. A supplementary survey validates the inference: given nothing but the firms’ identities, respondents use brand information to correctly classify whether the merging firms compete and to calibrate scrutiny to each deal’s economics, easing it for unrelated pairs while preserving it for true competitors. Decisions aligned with respondent preferences increase confidence in the antitrust agencies and presidential approval; enforcement failures reduce both. Complementing the experimental evidence, I construct an original dataset linking Hart-Scott-Rodino reviews from 2001 to 2020 to firm-level financial and brand data, showing that agency enforcement tracks these same dimensions, familiarity included. The alignment does not operate in the dark: nearly two-thirds of respondents name a real merger unprompted, and knowledge of enforcement concentrates where visible firms and agency action intersect. Together, the results show that citizens use familiarity as information rather than sentiment; democratic accountability can reach technical domains where partisan cues offer little guidance, to the extent that government’s choices are legible in the terms of everyday economic life.
- Frontiers of the Franchise: How Partisan Electoral Concerns Shape Public Support for Expanding Voting RightsSaikun Shi
How do perceived partisan and social ramifications of voting rights extensions affect public support for expanding the franchise? Through two original survey experi- ments, 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 pat- terns suggest that the mass public is mainly motivated by electoral threat when de- ciding 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.
- Targeted Advertising and Candidate EntryGreg Martin, and Saikun Shi
We examine how digital advertising influenced the pool of candidates for US federal and state legislative offices. We develop a model of candidate entry with an advertising stage, and use it to generate predictions about two consequences of digital advertising: 1) reduction in advertising costs, relative to television, and 2) increased precision in targeting subsets of the electorate. We show that the first effect increases competition and encourages the entry of candidates closer to the district median. But the second effect depends on the structure of targeting features available, and can undo the moderating effect of price reduction. We take the predictions to data on candidate entry and advertising decisions. We find asymmetric consequences across the major parties, with the price effect dominating for Democrats but the targeting effect dominating for Republicans. We connect this result to the advantageous structure of targeting features available to right-wing candidates.