Welcome!

I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Columbia University.

I am on the 2025-26 academic job market.

My research focuses on how strategic considerations shape the reactions of American voters and parties to the risk of democratic backsliding. My dissertation explores the circumstances in which voters and partisan activists react to threats from opponents by seeking compromise instead of escalation. I have related agendas on crossover voting (when voters participate in the primary of the opposing party), depolarization initiatives and how democratic norms shape intra-party competition. Broadly, I am interested in areas where the heightened stakes of contemporary politics inspire unusual or complex behaviors in the American public. Methodologically, I use survey and field experiments, as well as elite interviews and descriptive data.

My research has been supported by the Center for Effective Lawmaking, the Columbia Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences, the Columbia Center for Political Economy, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Stanford Polarization and Social Change Lab and the Civic Health and Institutions Project.

Working Papers (Drafts Available on Request)

• Does Fear of Retaliation Constrain Support for Democratic Backsliding?
  [Working Paper] (Job Market Paper)
  Abstract

  Can fear of the opposing party’s retaliation deter support for anti-democratic behavior? In contemporary American politics, partisans express fear that their opponents will violate democratic norms. In theory, this type of belief can reinforce support for democracy, if voters subscribe to a logic of deterrence and believe that opponents violate democratic norms if and only if they are first provoked. I study these beliefs in the American public and distinguish them theoretically and empirically from other contributors to preferences over democratic norms. In a pair of prediction experiments (n = 7,000; 26,000 predictions), I show that partisans predict retaliation from opponents but only of modest scale: an average of less than 10% increase in the probability of a norm violation compared to their baseline predictions in the absence of provocation. These predictions are smaller than equivalent beliefs from a sample of political elites and are far from theoretical maxima. In a set of follow-up experiments, I randomize exposure to an explicit warning of retaliation across 5 different proposals to distort rules in favor of the respondent's party across three experimental samples (n = 5,500). These warnings modestly but consistently reduce support for these proposals. I argue that this style of reasoning has the potential to promote pro-democratic attitudes even when voters have inconsistent commitments to democracy and elites are unwilling to promote high-minded arguments for democratic norms.

• Encouraging Crossover Voting in Presidential Primaries (with Hayley Cohen)
  [Working Paper] Conditionally Accepted, American Journal of Political Science
Abstract

Will voters participate in the primary of a party they oppose to prevent the nomination of a candidate they fear? Partnering with a Political Action Committee, we conduct a first-of-its-kind, large, preregistered field experiment (N = 83,800) in the lead-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire. A specialized get-out-the-vote intervention increases turnout in the Republican primary among undeclared voters who are modeled as likely to vote for Democratic candidates in the general election. Our treatment increased Republican primary turnout in this sample by 1.6 percentage points while reducing turnout in the Democratic Primary by 0.5 percentage points. Supplementing our experiment with surveys before and after the primary, we estimate that each vote cast by Democratic-leaning voters in the Republican primary had between a 78% and 95% probability of supporting the relatively moderate Republican primary candidate. We argue that voters are capable of sophisticated, risk-mitigating behavior in primaries.

• Cheating to Win? Beliefs about the Effectiveness of Democratic Transgressions
  (Dissertation Chapter)
  Abstract

  What do Americans predict as the material consequences of violating democratic rules? Recent scholarship has established that Americans broadly oppose anti-democratic behavior, but are unwilling to sacrifice partisan objectives in order to defend democracy. Despite a burgeoning agenda on citizen attitudes towards democracy, we know little about whether the mass views anti-democratic behavior as effective at either shifting electoral outcomes or achieving otherwise impossible policy objectives. Using an incentivized prediction experiment fielded in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, I explore these beliefs. I show that Americans' beliefs are partially consistent with standard academic accounts. First, respondents believe that anti-democratic behavior shifts election results, with the pooled effect across all respondents being roughly equivalent to the predicted effect of a large spending advantage for one candidate. Second, when considering Republican violations of democratic rules and norms, Democrats believe those violations are far more effective than Republican beliefs about the same behaviors. These results are normatively comforting, voters do not believe their side's violations of democratic rules are especially effective. Voters do not, however, distinguish between the effectiveness of changes to electoral rules and of threats directed at elected officials, despite the divergence in the plausible electoral impact of these behaviors.

• Experimentally Testing Anticipatory Balancing (with Cody Prosperini)
  (Under Review)
  Abstract

  Do voters engage in anticipatory balancing by supporting limited congressional power for the party they expect to win the presidency? We provide a causal test of existing descriptive accounts by using a repeated-measures experiment (N = 2900), which incorporates three embedded randomizations to test multiple mechanisms of anticipatory balancing. By priming (i) each candidate’s odds of winning the 2024 presidential election, (ii) the probability of extreme policy outcomes, and (iii) hypothetical election outcomes, we examine a range of mechanisms through which anticipatory balancing may occur. We find evidence only in the most extreme case: subjects engage in modest balancing (A 4 percentage point shift in preferences for congressional control and net vote share) in response to hypothetical accounts of certain victory by one candidate, with effects driven by sophisticated voters. Our results suggest anticipatory balancing is possible, but is limited in both magnitude and the contexts in which it can realistically occur.

• Use Your Inside Voice: Intra-Party Social Pressure and the Avoidance of Political Speech (with Patrick Liu)
(Under Review)
Abstract

Americans increasingly report censoring their political beliefs for fear of social repercussions—not from adversaries, but from co-partisans. We assess if the conventional theory that social pressure stifles minority opinions extends to this lesser-studied context. Using a nationwide survey experiment fielded during the 2024 primaries (N = 17,691), we show that intra-party speech is more costly to dissenters than the party faithful. Social pressure, however, constrains both. We document widespread misperceptions about the likelihood of social sanctions, then randomly correct these exaggerated fears to manipulate social pressure's salience. This intervention reduces self-censorship for party minorities and majorities alike, suggesting that intra-party social pressure results less from injunctive norms dictating what right-thinking partisans should say than from a widely shared aversion to divisive debate. To explain dissenters' disproportionate self-censorship, we look beyond assumptions about differential exposure to social pressure and highlight other important motivations—namely, majorities' unusual eagerness to persuade co-partisan opponents.

• Learning from the Lie: What Anti-Democratic Proposals Teach Voters about Candidates (with Patrick Liu and Carlo Prato).
Abstract

Why do anti-democratic candidates thrive in American politics, despite public opposition to most anti-democratic behavior? We offer a pair of explanations. First, promoting the violation of democratic rules serves as a signal of ideological commitment, such that voters infer. This mechanism allows for voters who view democratic values as mechanically orthogonal to policy, but who have beliefs about the distribution of positions in the population. Second, it is possible that such violations are signals of credibility about policies that can only be accomplished through transgressing norms.

• Field Testing Depolarization Initiatives (with Aaron Christensen and Andrew Thompson)
[Working Paper] (Under Review)
Abstract

Correcting false and negative beliefs about political opponents has shown promise in reducing anti-democratic attitudes and polarization. Despite the simple nature of such corrections, there is little extant evidence that they are effective beyond immediately administered survey outcomes and it is unclear which voters opt-in to such interventions. To test these mechanisms, we worked with a partner organization to implement a depolarization initiative that bundled factual belief corrections with elites modeling civil disagreement. We recruited an online panel of 3,461 eligible respondents and then randomized an offer to attend a 30 minute depolarization event in which bipartisan elites defended democratic values and discussed polling information suggesting a broad commitment to democracy across party lines. We report two main sets of findings. First, despite generous financial incentives, there was substantial differential compliance by partisanship, though not by pre-treatment attitudinal measures of affective polarization or anti-democratic attitudes. Second, our intervention achieved a durable reduction in beliefs that opponents were opposed to democracy (measured at 1 week and 2 months post-event) and in willingness to attend future depolarization events. However, we found no reduction in anti-democratic attitudes across many pre-registered outcomes. We use a follow-up survey experiment to explore the mechanisms underlying both of these findings.

• Crossover Voting in Congressional Primaries (with Hayley Cohen)
  Abstract

  Scholars express widespread concern about the pressure primary elections place on candidates to adopt ideologically extreme positions. Yet, in at least 17 open primary states, swathes of ideologically diverse voters are eligible to participate in primaries of parties with which they do not identify. This behavior remains rare, even as many elections are only competitive in the primary, leaving voters not of the dominant party without a say in the decisive electoral contest. Why? We propose three explanations. First, voters believe that participating in opposing party primaries goes against their affective partisan instincts and their understanding of democratic norms. Second, the set of candidates running in primaries may not be sufficiently appealing to opposing partisans to motivate crossover voting. Third, campaigns may not make efforts to encourage crossover voting. Across four preregistered survey and field experiments, we find support for all three mechanisms and show that it is feasible to encourage crossover voting in both survey experimental and real-world contexts - and that circumstances of elections dramatically affect voter propensity to crossover. We argue that this often dismissed form of voter behavior is necessary for institutional reforms that seek to reduce the polarizing pressure of partisan primaries to realize their goals, and is a key path for voters opposed to the majority party in single-party districts to make their vote count.

• Democratic Norms in Nominating Contests (with Hans Noel)
Abstract

America's parties have ceded formal control over presidential nominating contests to voters. But party elites retain substantial indirect control through endorsements and donations and wield direct control in usual circumstances like candidate withdrawals or contested conventions. At the same time, rising populist sentiment within each party has led to widespread public anger at elite involvement in primaries - and repeated allegations of improper efforts to influence nominations. In this paper, we explore what voters and elites believe is appropriate regarding the involvement of various party actors in the selection of nominees. We investigate these phenomena both in general and in unique circumstances surrounding Joe Biden's withdrawal in the 2024 nominating contest. We find that American voters express a deep skepticism of elite involvement in the nominating process. Even in the unusual case of Biden's withdrawal from the race, Democrats prefer that delegates selected the nominee who is favored by the majority of their co-partisans. We examine both sides of this question: party elites' beliefs about the appropriateness of involvement, and voter reactions to such involvement in both realistic and hypothetical scenarios.

Published Papers and Chapters

1. Daniel Markovits and Andrew O’Donohue. 2025. “The Court of Public Opinion: How Competing Rhetoric about Trump’s Prosecution Affects Political Attitudes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus. Forthcoming.
2. Donald P. Green and Daniel Markovits. 2025. “Field Experiments in Political Science.” In Encyclopedia of Experimental Social Science. Forthcoming.
3. Andrew J. Clarke and Daniel Markovits. 2024. “Congressional Town Halls.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 49 (4): 879–903.
4. Donald P. Green, Thomas Leavitt, and Daniel Markovits. 2023. “Challenges That Proprietary Research Poses for Meta-Analysis.” In Oxford Handbook of Engaged Methodological Pluralism in Political Science, eds. Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Daniel Markovits, Andrew Strange, and Dustin Tingley. 2019. “Foreign Aid and the Status Quo: Evidence from Pre-Marshall Plan Aid.” The Chinese Journal of International Politics 12 (4): 585–613.

Ongoing Projects

• Campaign Activists and the Strategic Acceptance of Moderation
• Comparing Deep and Standard Canvassing (with Donald P. Green)
• Norms and Outsiders in City Politics (with Justin Phillips and Emma Swanson)
• Effects of Moderate Campaign Messaging in the 2024 Presidential Election: Contrasting Evidence from Survey and Field Experiments
• Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope (Institute for Replication Working Paper, with many co-authors, Revise and Resubmit)
• How Accidental Mistargeting of Political Advertising Affects Experimental Estimates
  Abstract

  What is the effect of an intervention where treatment can be accidentally served to individuals whose outcomes and compliance are not observed? I consider a setting where treatment is assigned to an experimental universe with visible compliance and outcomes, but that universe is part of a broader population of interest whose outcomes and treatment status are not observed. I consider how the unintentional, and often un-observed, re-allocation of "missed" treatment from non-compliers in the treatment group to the rest of the universe affects estimation. To explore this mechanism requires two calculations, which reflect facts on the ground that can rarely be directly observed by experimenters. First, the accidental targeting creates a set of always-takers whose proportion is dependent on the geographic density of the experimental universe relative to the population. Second, the same re-allocation creates a treatment effect among accidentally targeted individuals in the population who are not in the intended experimental universe altogether. Depending on assumptions about treatment effect heterogeneity and the relative weights an implementing organization places on persuading individuals not in the target population, this later mechanism can dramatically affect interpretations of cost effectiveness. Failing to account for these mechanisms serves to understate the treatment effect of many media experiments.