Research

Research Agenda

My research explores how national history and other narratives about one's ingroup can structure modern political attitudes and behavior.  How do individuals think about the past, and how does this affect voting behavior or other political attitudes? 

Relatedly, some of these histories have led to stigmatized ideologies and parties. In another strand of research, I explore changing stigma around the radical right and some of its consequences. 

I mainly examine these questions in democratic settings, with a specific focus on Europe (mainly Spain and Portugal), the United States, and Israel. 

My dissertation connects these two phenomena. As a starting point, it validates that nostalgic individuals tend to be the most likely to support the radical right in post right-wing authoritarian settings. The dissertation looks beyond this correlation to explore whether and how public nostalgia and the success and normalization of the radical right feed into one another, plausibly creating a "vicious cycle." From a top-down perspective, it theorizes and tests how the normalization of nostalgic political elites might cause the public to pick up or reject these same attitudes towards the past. From a bottom-up perspective, it investigates how individuals’ nostalgia drives the selection of parties and influences strategic choices by parties. Drawing on survey experiments in Spain and Portugal and cross-national analysis, the project improves our understandings of nostalgia, party politics, and changing social norms.

A copy of my CV can be found here.

In Progress:

Conditionally accepted

Working papers/under review

Published Projects:

Re-evaluating the impact of collective victimhood on conflict attitudes: Results from a natural experiment, a survey experiment, and panel study using Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day (With Nadav G. Shelef, AJPS - http://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12906) 

A significant observational literature identifies a link between collective victimhood and conflict-enhancing attitudes, though results from experimental work increasing victimhood's salience vary. This article thus revisits this question in two studies in a context in which increased salience is especially likely to shift attitudes. Study 1 exploits the happenstance fielding of 12 surveys over Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day between 1979 and 2021. Using all 192 available estimates assessing hawkishness, preferences for out-group exclusion, and in-group solidarity, it fails to detect statistically significant effects of a state-led effort to increase the salience of Israel's collective victimhood narrative in a natural setting 90% of the time. Study 2 replicates the null findings across multiple comparisons and outcomes in a companion harmonized panel and survey experiment. Substantively, the findings suggest that it may be harder to use short-term manipulations of collective victimhood to shift attitudes than often assumed.

Populism and the Pandemic: France and the Rassemblement National (with Marta Lorimer)

In a book chapter on populist reactions to the pandemic and cross-national report on social media communication, both co-authored with Marta Lorimer (LSE), we explore the rhetoric and actions Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (RN) party throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic. In both pieces, we argue that Le Pen and the RN engaged in a careful strategy of balancing respectability and radicalization. The strategy fits well with the party's attempt to 'de-demonize' itself, a choice driven largely by incentives present in the French electoral system.

Turning right? Party position change on immigration in the European 'Refugee Crisis'

In a policy brief, I assess the whether and how differential levels of migration throughout the so-called European 'Refugee Crisis' induce parties to shift positions on immigration. While existing studies assess how party systems transform with long-term demographic shifts, little work explores the effect of short-term shocks to levels of diversity. Using basic OLS modeling and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy, findings suggest that higher exposure to racial diversification at the national level induced restrictive shifts in immigration positions only among center-right parties throughout the crisis. I make sense of these findings by considering incentives that parties when pressured to confront an issue.