Research Interests
- Political Psychology
- Public Opinion
- Survey Methodology
Projects
Spatial Proximity to BLM Protests Reduces White Police Legitimacy (with Arvind Krishnamurthy and John Aldrich)
A growing body of research has demonstrated the effects of Black Lives Matter (BLM) on White racial and policy attitudes. However, much of that work focuses on the short-term effects of protest, rather than investigating the durability of shifting attitudes. Using the CES and Nationscape data, we show that while the Summer of 2020 activity was associated with a short-term reduction in police favorability, in aggregate, White attitudes quickly reverted back towards pre-Summer 2020 levels. However, while aggregate opinion reverted, we provide evidence that in this same post-2020 period, subsequent local protest or police violence exposure liberalized White policing attitudes. These two findings suggest that the effects of BLM on White attitudes are not as simple as shifting aggregate opinion. Instead, the social movement may have raised salience or attention for subsequent local events to shift attitudes.
Support for the MAGA Movement among Republicans: Its Bases and Consequences (with Laura Stoker, Lonna Atkeson, and John Aldrich)
This paper examines the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement within the Republican Party, identifying its unique characteristics and implications for American politics. Our analysis reveals that roughly a third of Republicans identify as MAGA supporters. Like the Tea Party before them, MAGA Republicans are more likely to be white, male, older, evangelical, and born-again Christians compared to the rest of the GOP. Attitudinally, MAGA supporters are more affectively polarized than other Republicans, and are significantly more conservative on matters of race, gender, and immigration. They also exhibit lower levels of trust in elections, political institutions, and scientific experts, and are more prone to believing right-wing conspiracy theories, including the election fraud claims made by Donald Trump. Despite this heightened dissatisfaction with and distrust of the political system, MAGA supporters are far more politically engaged than other Republicans, being more likely to have voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections and engaging in a broader range of political activities. We argue these aspects of MAGA Republicans’ behavior underscore the movement’s outsized impact on policy and candidate selection in the Republican Party. Overall, our results indicate that MAGA Republicans have become a sizeable and potentially enduring faction within the Republican party.
Slavery and the Cultural Persistence of Status-Legitimizing Ideologies in the South
This paper examines the lasting influence of slavery on political and racial ideologies in the U.S. South. Drawing on social dominance theory and group position theory, I argue that the institution of slavery fostered “status-legitimizing” ideologies among white populations, particularly in regions heavily reliant on slave labor. These ideologies emphasized white superiority, legitimized group inequalities, and shaped attitudes toward African Americans, immigrants, and other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities long after the end of the Civil War. Utilizing cotton suitability as a proxy for exposure to historical slavery rates, I find that whites who live in counties with larger pre-Civil War slave populations display a stronger attachment to “status-legitimizing” attitudes and beliefs, including stronger feelings of racial pride, stronger beliefs in the legitimacy of group-based inequalities, and heightened prejudice against multiple racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. My results illuminate often-overlooked historical processes in shaping ideological justifications for prejudice and discrimination against groups in society.
Belief in a Just World and Racial Resentment: Social Dominance Orientation and Status Threat as Explanations for Just-World Rationalizations of Racial Inequality
Several recent publications have found that racial resentment (RR) is highly correlated with the belief in a just world (BJW), but existing work offers competing explanations for this bivariate relationship. On one hand, Just World Theory (JWT) suggests that both the BJW and RR arise from a psychological need to maintain the delusional, yet comforting, belief that the world is fair and just. Social Dominance Theory (SDT), on the other hand, views the BJW as a “legitimizing” ideology, which arises from and masks an inegalitarian, dispositional desire to dominate low-status groups and maintain existing social hierarchies. I adjudicate between these competing perspectives with two data sets: (1) a large survey of adult residents of the US south (N=2,468), and (2) an online survey experiment conducted with a convenience sample of adult residents of the US (N=1,823), which tests whether the BJW moderates the effect of exposure to information about racial inequality on post-treatment measures of racial resentment and color-blind racism. On the whole, my results confirm the predictions of SDT over those of JWT. Among residents of the Southern US, I find that the BJW is higher among members of “high-status” groups (White Americans, men, and high-income earners), and that BJW and SDO are more strongly correlated with RR and other measures of racial attitudes—including measures of linked fate, zero sum competition, and skepticism of discrimination against racial minorities—among White Southerners. Analyzing the results from my online survey experiment, I find a significant interaction between BJW and treatment condition, such that White respondents who score highly on the BJW are more likely to express racially resentful and colorblind racial attitudes when they are told that racial inequality can be solved relative to the control condition and treatments that depict racial inequality as unsolvable.
Value Congruence and Moral Persuasion: Testing the Effects of Moral Reframing in Competitive, Partisan Message Environments
Moral reframing—a messaging strategy that entails reformulating counter-attitudinal appeals to make them consistent with a target audience’s moral values—has been touted by moral psychologists as a means of reducing political polarization in the US. However, existing work has yet to examine the effects of moral reframing in competitive, partisan message environments, where voters are exposed to multiple political messages simultaneously, and parties clearly communicate their policy positions. Based on past work on message framing, I predict partisan cues and conflicting moral frames will diminish morally reframed messages’ persuasive efficacy, limiting their potential to reduce polarization on environmental policy. I test these predictions with a replication and extension of Feinberg and Willer (2013)’s highly cited environmental moral reframing experiment, adding conditions that vary the number and content of morally reframed messages for and against environmental protections and that randomly introduce partisan cues. Overall, I find only weak evidence that moral reframing affects respondents’ environmental attitudes, regardless of the message’s moral fit. Instead, I find that including partisan cues makes respondents more likely to adopt environmental policy attitudes consistent with their preferred political party.
Bureaucracy Bashing and Trust in Public Employees (with Jan P. Vogler)
In popular fiction and the news media, the words "government" and "bureaucracy" are often used interchangeably to describe the administrative state. However, these terms convey distinct positive and negative connotations, which we argue have diverging second-order effects on how citizens view public employees of the administrative state. Based on the pejorative etymology of the term bureaucracy, we hypothesize that portraying public employees as bureaucrats will negatively impact respondents' perceptions of their trustworthiness and competence. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two equivalence framing experiments and find that describing public employees as "bureaucrats" instead of "government employees" significantly reduces perceptions of their trustworthiness and increases perceptions of corruption. We further examine our results for heterogeneous treatment effects across several key political predispositions and find that respondents who are \textit{low} in social dominance orientation (SDO) are more likely to alter their attitudes towards public employees in response to bureaucratic depictions.