Yuhsien Sung receives the 2019 - 2020 SPARC Graduate Research Grant. The SPARC grant
is a merit-based award sponsored by the office of the Vice President for Research
to promote creative research across all disciplines at South Carolina.
Sung's research examines the relationship between voter preferences and the changing
landscape of prosecutors’ electoral platforms. The common wisdom supposing that citizens
prefer politicians who are “tough on crime” is deeply rooted in scholarly and public
discourse. However, such a claim has never been empirically tested. Using a novel
conjoint survey experiment, she examines which prosecutorial attributes matter to
which kinds of voters. The result helps us identify the role of candidates’ attributes
in generating support or opposition. This project will be among the first to advance
our knowledge of prosecutorial-election dynamics, shedding light on how America’s
justice-system elections work.