Hello! I am a graduating senior in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. I am interested in pursuing a PhD in Political Science, specifically in comparative politics.
My research interests are political behavior in democracies, elections and vote choice, electoral competition, and threats to democracy.
Ty Gribbe Honors Thesis Complete.pdf
gribble_immigration_attitudes_survey_experiment.pdf
The Image of Climate Disinformation - GDIL | Global Disinformation Lab at UT Austin.pdf
Abstract: Discrimination towards citizens based on race, ethnicity, and religion has been analyzed extensively at the level of elected politicians, but much less at the level of bureaucrats, whose mission requires prima facie impartiality towards citizens. In this paper, we examine whether local bureaucrats discriminate when answering requests by their constituencies. In doing so, we conduct a correspondence-audit field experiment in which actual citizens contact bureaucrats to request information on public services in Texas. Benefitting from the variation within confederates in terms of their race and ethnicity, as well as their religious background, we match them on covariates and statistically maximize differences on the key dimensions between individuals in pairs. Afterward, we randomly assign individuals from the pairs as treatments (or controls) in contacting government agencies. Our main outcome variable is responsiveness, particularly whether the agency responds and how helpful the response is. To analyze the data on how long it takes our confederates to get a response, we use survival analysis. We anticipate that racial/ethnic and religious minorities will be subject to more discrimination, manifested by a decreased likelihood in response and poorer quality responses. This research contributes to the literature on discrimination by public officials and makes methodological and ethical improvements to correspondence-audit experiments.