Comments on Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 "…State legislators and their responsiveness to undocumented immigrants"

Political Research Quarterly published Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 "¿Quien importa? State legislators and their responsiveness to undocumented immigrants", about an experiment in which state legislators were sent messages, purportedly from a Latinx person such as Juana Martinez or from an Eastern European person such as Anastasia Popov, with message senders describing themselves as "residents", "citizens", or "undocumented immigrants".

I'm not sure of the extent to which response rates to the purported undocumented immigrants were due to state legislative offices suspecting that this was yet another audit study. Or maybe it's common for state legislators to receive messages from senders who invoke their undocumented status, as in this experiment ("As undocumented immigrants in your area we are hoping you can help us").

But that's not what this post is about.

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1.

Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 Table 1 Model 2 reports estimates from a logit regression predicting whether a response was received from the state legislator, with predictors such as legislative professionalism. The coefficient was positive for legislative professionalism, indicating that, on average and other model variables held constant, legislators from states with higher levels of legislative professionalism were more likely to respond, compared to legislators from states with lower levels of legislative professionalism.

Another Model 2 predictor was "state", which had a coefficient of 0.007, a standard error of 0.002, and three statistical significance asterisks indicating that, on average and other model variables held constant -- what? -- legislators from states with more "state-ness" were more likely to respond? I'm pretty sure that this "state" predictor was coded with states later in the alphabet such as Wyoming assigned a higher number than states earlier in the alphabet such as Alabama. I don't think makes any sense as a predictor of response rates, but the predictor was statistically significant, so that's interesting.

The "state" variable was presumably meant to be included as a categorical predictor, based on the Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 text (emphasis added):

For example, we include the Squire index for legislative professionalism (Squire 2007), the chamber in which the legislator serves, and a fixed effects variable for states.

I think this is something that a peer reviewer or editor should catch, especially because Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 doesn't report that many results in tables or figures.

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2.

Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 Table 1 model 2 omits the sender category of undocumented Latinx, so that results for the five included sender categories can be interpreted relative to omitted sender category of undocumented Latinx. So far so good.

But then Garcia and Sadhwani 2022 interprets the other predictors as applying to only the omitted sender category of undocumented Latinx, such as (sic for "respond do a request"):

To further examine the potential impact of sentiments toward immigrants and immigration at the state level, we included a variable ("2012 Romney states") to examine if legislators in states that went to Romney in the 2012 presidential election were less likely to respond do a request from an undocumented immigrant. We found no such relationship in the data.

This apparent misinterpretation appears in the abstract (emphasis added):

We found that legislators respond less to undocumented constituents regardless of their ethnicity and are more responsive to both the Latinx and Eastern European-origin citizen treatments, with Republicans being more biased in their responsiveness to undocumented residents.

I'm interpreting that emphasized part to mean that the Republican legislator gap in responsiveness to undocumented constituents compared to citizen constituents was larger than the non-Republican legislator gap in responsiveness to undocumented constituents compared to citizen constituents. And I don't think that's correct based on the data for Garcia and Sadhwani 2022.

My analysis used an OLS regression to predict whether a legislator responded, with only a predictor for "undocCITIZ" coded 1 for undocumented senders and 0 for citizen senders. Coefficients were -0.07 among Republican legislators and -0.11 among non-Republican legislators, so the undocumented/citizen gap was not larger among Republican legislators compared to non-Republican legislators. Percentage responses are in the table below:

SENDER         GOP NON-GOP 
Citizen EEurop 21  23
Citizen Latina 26  29
Control EEurop 25  33
Control Latina 18  20
Undocum EEurop 18  12
Undocum Latina 15  17
OVERALL        20  22

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NOTE

1. No response yet to my Nov 17 tweet to a co-author of Garcia and Sadhwani 2022.