Tabitha Bonilla
Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy
IPR Fellow - On leave 2024–25
PhD, Political Science, Stanford University, 2015
Tabitha Bonilla studies political behavior, identity, communication and broadly examines how the public understands politics and policy. One area of her work focuses on the effects of campaign rhetoric on voter perceptions of representation and voter mobilization. A second area of research focuses on how the public understands policies and social movements and subsequent consequences on support and access. Across her work, she focuses on how messaging polarizes attitudes or can bridge attitudinal divides, how norms and political socialization vary, and how perceptions of policy can lead to incomplete resource distribution. Her work incorporates a range of methods including surveys, experiments, interviews, and text analysis.
Bonilla earned her PhD in political science in 2015 from Stanford University. She then worked as a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow in the political science department at the University of Southern California through 2016.
Current Research
Restrictive Policies and Effects on Political Behavior. In the past three years, unprecedented numbers of restrictive policies on teaching race and anti-trans legislation and book bans have been introduced. The primary focus of research on these restrictive polices has been to understand policy enactment—largely as a result of racism or transphobia. This project seeks to understand how these policies affect stake holders associated with secondary schools. First, teachers—as street-level bureaucrats—play a role in policy implementation and contribute to policy-feedback from their unique role in both citizens and implementors. Second, high school students and their parents play a critical role in understanding how these policies matter for education, particularly how they matter for civic education. And, these laws are becoming national topics of discussion during a critical period of political socialization and civic education for high school students.
Issue Appeals Versus Group-Based Appeals. Discussions of election strategies in the United States often revolve around which party can attract specific demographic groups, and what the parties can offer those groups. A prominent example of this discourse is the Republican National Committee’s report on the 2012 election, which focused specifically on how the party can better attract African-Americans, Latinos, and women in order to win subsequent elections. This project investigates the efficacy of how parties appeal specifically to African-American and Latino voters through two survey experiments. By making group-based appeals, candidates induce a negative effect in vote choice for in-group members. In both experiments, respondents generally prefer candidates when the candidates’ appeals indicate a demonstrated commitment to issues affecting that community. And, even when issue appeals correspond to group appeals, candidates perform best when making issue appeals alone.
Promises Kept, Promises Broken, and Those Caught in the Middle. Voters have a nuanced understanding of promise fulfillment that is dependent on perceptions of candidate effort and success. Given high levels of partisan identification and how partisan identity shapes assessments of accuracy, Bonilla argues that partisanship also shapes perceptions of promise fulfillment. Two original survey experiments test how respondents react to kept, broken, and partially fulfilled promises on the issues of immigration and human trafficking. Bonilla demonstrates that co-partisans differentiate between kept and broken promises, but that does not translate into voter preferences. This is particularly true of out-partisans who do not distinguish promise-keeping from promise-breaking. These results suggest nuance to the traditional assumptions around how promise fulfillment is assessed in reelection campaigns.
Selected Publications
Sahar D’Urso, A. and T. Bonilla. 2023. Religion or race? Using intersectionality to examine the role of Muslim identity and evaluations on belong in the United States. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 8(2): 202–22.
Bonilla, T., A. Filindra, and N. Lajevardi. 2022. How source cues shape evaluations of group-based derogatory political messages. The Journal of Politics 84(4): 1979–96.
Bonilla, T. 2022. Promises kept, promises broken, and those caught in the middle. IPR Working Paper Series.
Bonilla, T. 2022. The Importance of Campaign Promises. Cambridge University Press.
Bonilla, T. and A. Tillery. 2020. Which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #BlackLivesMatter movement? An experimental test. American Political Science Review 114(4): 947–62.
Bonilla, T. and C. Mo. 2019. The evolution of human trafficking messaging in the United States and its effect on public opinion. Journal of Public Policy 39(2): 201–34.
Bonilla, T. and C. Mo. 2018. Bridging the partisan divide on immigration policy attitudes through a bipartisan issue area: The case of human trafficking. Journal of Experimental Political Science 5(2): 107–20.
