Ariel White

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Ariel White is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her work focuses on Americans’ voting behavior, especially how personal interactions with government can shape people’s participatory decisions.

White’s doctoral dissertation explores when punitive policies (such as deportation or incarceration) provoke political mobilization as well as when they instead dampen political involvement. While at Radcliffe, she will work on papers measuring the causal effect of short jail sentences on voter turnout, both for people sentenced to jail and for those close to them.

White received her BA in economics and government from Cornell University. Before graduate school, she worked at a legal services office in Ithaca, New York. At Harvard, her research has been supported by the Center for American Political Studies, the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, and a term-time research award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.