Research Interests

Being asked what your research interests are can sometimes bring on a sense of dread. What am I interested in? How cohesive is my research agenda? Do I make sense, or is this person in the crowded mingle just nodding politely? But articulating your interests is important. Not just pragmatically, not just for finding your crowd, and getting people to read your work – all of these are important, but it also articulates what you want to do for yourself.

Here is my pitch: I am interested in how people take social cues from others in politics. How the perception of what is (un)acceptable changes or does not change their behavior. I am also interested in how identity, whether it be partisan, national or something else interacts with these social cues.

In my dissertation, I examine whether people falsify their preferences. I do this by looking at cases where privacy changes and through examining sanctioning behavior. Here, I leverage changes in the costs of expressing unpopular or stigmatized opinions either through reducing privacy or through social sanctioning both of which raise the costs of dissent. I am primarily interested in studying this in democratic settings.

I have a separate research area where I examine the effects of events from abroad on domestic attitudes. For example, how information about rights retrenchment (i.e. civil liberties erosion and abortion bans) in the United States affects attitudes in Europe towards the United States. Or how the Trump tariff escalations affect European identity. This interest is driven by my own background - as an American who is also a naturalized European - but I believe in an increasingly interconnected world this type of internationalization of identity and social cueing is extremely important.

I have some experience working with social media data. In my master’s thesis I provided descriptive estimates of politicians’ tweet removal, and examined possible factors associated with this. This was driven by a similar interest as my eventual PhD dissertation topic, how groups behave, how sanctioning occurs, and whether individuals self-censor. I pivoted away from social media research due to the increasing difficulty of API access. Even though this research never was published, I am very proud it was cited in this excellent Political Analysis article by Andreas Küpfer on Twitter post decay.

Because of my past work at International IDEA and with the DEMSCORE project I am quite familiar with various cross-country comparative data sources, and the design and creation of these datasets.

Lastly, because I dabbled in historical political economy for a paper on the implementation of the secret ballot – I have read a lot about the political development of the American South in the 19th century. This was a sidequest in my PhD journey, which I really enjoyed.