Ariel White studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal justice system, and bureaucratic behavior. Her work uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people’s everyday interactions with government.

Her recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement. In other projects, she and her co-authors have examined how local election officials treat constituents of different ethnicities, how media shapes public conversations, and how citizens react to rising economic inequality.  Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Science, Political Behavior, and elsewhere.

She is an assistant professor of Political Science at MIT.  Previously, she was a graduate student in the Government Department at Harvard, and a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy (at Harvard’s Kennedy School) and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.