Christian C. Caballero

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Fellow at the Civic Power Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School.

I study how organizations in civil society structure political participation, representation, and power in the United States. Across this work, I examine social movement organizations, advocacy nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and business leaders using large-scale administrative data, surveys, network analysis, and quasi-experimental research designs.

1. Political Practitioners Poorly Predict Which Messages Persuade the Public (with David Broockman, Joshua Kalla, and Matthew Easton). 2025. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Details

   Abstract: Do political practitioners have good intuitions about how to persuade the public? Longstanding theories that political elites’ messages have large effects on public opinion and the large sums spent to secure some practitioners’ messaging advice suggest they should. However, findings regarding the surprising limits of expert forecasts in other domains suggest they may not. In this paper, we evaluate how well political practitioners can predict which messages are most persuasive. We measured the effects of N = 172 messages about 21 political issues using a large-sample survey experiment (N = 67,215 respondent-message observations). We then asked both political practitioners (N = 1,524 practitioners, N = 22,763 predictions) and laypeople (N = 21,247 respondents, N = 63,442 predictions) to predict the efficacy of these messages. The practitioners we surveyed ranged widely in their experience and expertise with persuasive message design. We find that: (a) political practitioners and laypeople both performed barely better than chance at predicting persuasive effects; (b) once accounting for laypeople’s inflated expectations about the average size of effects, practitioners did not predict meaningfully better than laypeople; (c) these results held even for self-identified issue experts and highly experienced practitioners; and (d) practitioners’ experience, expertise, information environment, and demographics did not meaningfully explain variation in their accuracy. Our findings have theoretical implications for understanding the conditions likely to produce meaningful elite influence on public opinion as well as practical implications for practitioners.

   

   Figure 1: Raw Data at the Message Level. Each point corresponds with one of the 172 messages tested, with the estimated treatment effects of those messages shown on the x-axis and the average predictions of either practitioners (red) or the mass public (blue) shown on the y-axis. See SI Appendix, Fig. S3 for results split by issue/side.

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1. The Political Evolution of Business Elites: Longitudinal Evidence from the Technology Industry
   Under Review. (with Olivier Bergeron-Boutin, Pia Deshpande, Greg Ferenstein, Amir Goldberg, John Konicki, and Neil Malhotra). Details

   Abstract: Wealthy industries—and the individuals that control them—exert disproportionate influence over policymaking, yet systematic, industry-specific data on how economic elites change their political views over time remains scarce. This paper investigates the political preferences of U.S. technology entrepreneurs, a uniquely powerful interest group that many claim shifted right, contributed to President Trump's 2024 victory, and held sway over the Administration's policymaking. We conduct a novel survey of venture-backed founders, combining a fresh cross-section with a decade-long longitudinal panel. We find a more nuanced answer than a uniform rightward shift: technology elites have moved to the right, modestly, on variables such as party identification and support for redistribution. However, they have moved leftwards on regulation, and in other domains, their preferences have remained stable. These findings suggest that the political alignment of economic elites cannot be inferred from material interests alone; it is produced through the interaction of material interests, social values, partisan identities, and industry-specific political cultures.

   

   Figure 1: Changes in Political Attitudes Among Technology Elites (2017 vs. 2025 Cross-Sections).

2. Power to the Organized? How Formalization Shapes Political Contention. (draft available upon request) Details

   Abstract: Civil society depends on organizations to translate grievances into public claims. Yet civil society organizations vary enormously, from grassroots collectives to social movement organizations to philanthropic foundations. How do these differences shape the political strategies organizations pursue? This paper examines protests in the United States and the organizations that participate in them, comparing IRS-registered tax-exempt organizations with informal protest actors not matched to IRS records. I argue that organizational form structures protest politics by shaping which claims civic actors advance, which tactics they adopt, and how long they remain publicly active. To test this argument, I link IRS Business Master File records to U.S. protest event data, constructing an organizational-level dataset of more than 50,000 civic actors engaged in protest. I also exploit within-organization changes around the timing of tax-exempt registration. I find that tax-exempt status is associated with narrower protest issue scope, lower participation in high-risk protest events, and greater persistence as a named protest actor. These patterns suggest that formalization does not simply strengthen civil society; it makes organizations more durable and institutionally legible, but also more specialized and tactically constrained and helps explain why civil society's democratic effects depend not only on the grievances it contains, but on the organizational vehicles through which those grievances are expressed.

• Between Donors and Democracy: How Civic Organizations Navigate Competing Definitions of Success (with Jae Yeon Kim and Liz McKenna).
• Cross-Pressured or Connected Communities? The Role of Bridging Ties in Political Mobilization.