Ryan Graham Baxter-King

Current Student

https://ryanbk.github.io/

Biography

I study how real-world events interact with voters’ partisan attachments to shape elections and public opinion in the United States. More broadly, I am interested in electoral accountability, political participation, and representation — especially when these questions intersect with public health. I have experience collaborating across disciplinary boundaries, including with researchers and practitioners in medicine, psychology, and public health. Currently, I am part of the UCLA Covid-19 Health and Politics Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between social scientists and medical doctors at UCLA and Harvard. I am also a member of [the Practical Causal Inference Lab](www.practicallycausal.com). I previously worked at [the AIDS Institute](https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/aids/) and [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center](https://www.mskcc.org/).

My dissertation primarily focuses on an extended case study of mass shootings, investigating whether these salient events affect voters’ political attitudes and behavior. This research applies rigorous causal inference techniques to large-scale survey data and administrative databases while using survey experiments to test specific mechanisms and scope conditions. This dissertation work is supported by a $15,000 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the [Rapoport Family Foundation](www.rapoportfamilyfoundation.com).