Broadly speaking, I study political behavior in American politics. I am especially interested in how the social world intersects with the political world, and I have investigated this in a few ways. First, I have examined how people’s desire to present themselves well to others shapes people’s political expressions—looking at how this can (or cannot) influence their reported political attitudes, political values, affective polarization, partisan attachment, and civic engagement. Second, I have researched how dynamics of interpersonal political interactions can influence people’s political attitudes and behavior—examining how motivations, gender, tone, expectations of conflict, and confidence influence the occurrence, processes, and outcomes of social communication about politics. I am currently expanding this work by studying formative discussion experiences among college and high school students. Third, I have examined how general interpersonal interactions are shaped by—and shape—politics, looking at how political anger decreases social interactions between partisans, how often and under what circumstances people sever social ties due to politics, and how group steretypes shape feminist affiliation (both a paper and a book project).
My work has received multiple awards from the American Political Science Association and been funded by university grants, Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, and the Institute for Humane Studies. It has also been published by Cambridge University Press, the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Science Research and Methods, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Policy Studies Journal.
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