Ariel White

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Ariel White is the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior, often using large data sets or experiments to shed light on people’s everyday interactions with government.

White’s recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement. During the fellowship year, she is studying efforts to re-incorporate people into civic life after a criminal conviction. In other projects, she and her coauthors have examined how local election officials treat constituents of different ethnicities, how media shapes public conversations, and how citizens react to rising economic inequality.

White earned a PhD in political science from Harvard University. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Science, and elsewhere.