Research in progress

Most recent update: 01/30/2026

TAN parties and Europe: What they say …. and what they do.

(with Spencer Corp, Gary Marks, and Sayman Rohleder-Stribl, draft in progress)

We investigate the tension between traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist (TAN) party rhetoric and voting in the European Parliament between 2014 and 2024. Our prior is that TAN parties navigate the interplay between two goals: defending the national community and traditionalist-authoritarian values on the one hand and reaping the benefits of scale in the provision of public goods through EU membership on the other. To assess and explain rhetoric, we develop fine-grained scoring on TAN EU posturing in electoral manifestos. To assess and explain practice, we generate a novel scoring scheme of EP legislation content to capture scale and community effects. We apply OpenAI techniques to produce reliable and valid measures. We find that despite rhetorical appeals in their manifestos, TAN parties, particularly those in government, are responsive to policy-specific economies of scale that internalize externalities and overcome free-riding.

When voters punish democratic norm violations and when not.

(with Gary Marks and Julia Schulte-Cloos, draft in progress)

When do voters decide not to punish democratic norm violations even though they broadly disapprove? Extant research shows that partisanship and policy often trump adherence to democratic norms. We expect to corroborate this finding, but believe it needs qualification with respect to 1) the nature of democratic norms — whether democratic norms are electoral-strategic or constrain arbitrary rule, 2) individual-level predispositions of tolerating or sanctioning undemocratic behavior, and 3) the perceived strength of an outparty’s threat to democracy. Conjoints in which respondents evaluate candidates running for governor in the US fielded nine months before the election and nine months after the start of the Trump administration allow us to assess moderating effects in a changing political context.

Field of education and political attitudes: The power and limits of field theory.

(with Gary Marks, Jonne Kamphorst, and Julia-Schulte-Cloos, R&R)

A growing body of research suggests that a person’s field of study in college shapes their political worldview.  Yet basic questions remain unanswered. How powerful is field in models predicting political attitudes relative to income, gender, ethnicity, and most importantly, level of education? Which kinds of political orientations are associated with field of study, and which are not? Using original and public surveys, we find that the human-centeredness of a field of study is strongly associated with liberal views on a wide range of political attitudes in Europe and the United States. The statistical effect of field rivals or exceeds that of level of education. However, the theory we propose has scope conditions that specify both where it applies and where it does not. Field of study does not shape attitudes related to political engagement – that is, a person’s interest in politics, sense of efficacy, propensity to participate, or emotional identification with political parties.

Why men and women vote differently on the transnational divide.

(with Jonne Kamphorst, Gary Marks, Ye Wang. Under review)

This paper conceives the contemporary gender gap in voting as a life-course outcome of gendered sorting in education and work. Drawing on social role theory, we argue that the gender gap is linked to the division of labor in which women and men disproportionately enter different fields of study and occupational environments. We test the effect of socialization in education and work using cross-national surveys and longitudinal panels. Decomposition and mediation analysis show that differences in educational and occupational field account for a substantial share of the gender gap in GAL/TAN voting. Within-person panel estimates indicate that entering higher education, especially into fields with high cultural-communicative content, is followed by shifts toward GAL/Green support. Gendered pathways through education and employment translate structural change in durable political cleavages.