About Me
Hello! My name is Chano Arreguin, the proud son of Mexican immigrants born and raised in California's Central Valley. I am currently a PhD candidate at Rice University in the department of Political Science. I completed a BA in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Research
My academic interests are understanding the sources and consequences of public opinion and how the masses can make competent decisions. More specifically, I am interested in how affectively charged (or expressive) social/partisan identities interact with more instrumental policy desires in influencing political motivation and behavior. I am also interested in drawing links with the human evolutionary sciences whenever helpful in presenting a more comprehensive explanation of human behavior.
- American Politics
- Public Opinion
- Political Psychology
- Evolutionary Social Science
- Experimental Methods
Publications
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Arreguin, (2023) "Partisan niche construction: Out-party affect, geographic sorting, and mate selection." Politics and the Life Sciences.
Download Article
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Analysis Files
- Covered in PsyPost
Works in Progress (email me for most recent draft)
- Arreguin, "The Contours of Preferences for Economic Policy Outcomes"
- Arreguin, "Unifying Instrumental and Expressive Political Motivations"
It is often an unquestioned assumption that partisans in the United States want different policy outcomes given their varying political preferences and choices. Whether rooted in values, a salient identity, interests, fleeting attitudes, or elite rhetoric, opposing partisan preferences that lead to different political choices are implicitly linked to desires for distinct policy outcomes. An issue with this link is the fact that revealed preferences in political contexts are biased revelations of true preferences given strategic thinking. Additionally, direct connections between outcomes and future preferences are themselves difficult to draw since outcomes are generally noisy preventing a clear linkage. The resulting uncertainty complicates inference of true preferences from constituent retrospective updating given policy outcomes. I conduct a conjoint experiment to gauge the extent to which partisans prefer different outcomes, where revealed preference is directly coupled to policy outcomes. The results illustrate a nuanced picture of partisan preferences.
Formally modeling behavior of the masses requires assumptions that some political scientists are wary about. Typically, these include stable and constrained preferences, which occupy one or multiple dimensions. This characterizes the instrumental approach where candidate/party performance, ideology, or policy preferences are the determining factors of behavior. Alternatively, the expressive approach posits a stronger role of social identities, where behavior arises from affective attachments to groups and the desire to be victorious over a competing group. Here, winning is paramount, sometimes regardless of policy outcome considerations. I link the two approaches by showing how noisy policy outcomes enable more expressive motivations and less noise enables more instrumentality. I adapt an elite selection model to show how noise varying contexts influence the extent of instrumental versus expressive voting. Results illustrate how voters who care about policy outcomes may replace incumbents even when challengers provide no policy competency information.
Contact Me
Email: ca34@rice.edu
X/Twitter: @ChanoArreguin