Research

My substantive research lies at the intersection of polarization, political behavior, and state policy extremism. I am primarily focused on how state laws affect mass political behavior; especially how Americans perceive and respond to state-level policy extremism on today’s most contentious social and cultural issues. I use a diverse range of quantitative methods, including conjoint experiments, machine learning applications, and applied causal inference identification strategies to empirically answer these questions.

A large portion of my dissertation research explores whether individuals are inclined to “vote with their feet” in response to extremist laws governing access to abortion, gun ownership, and the freedom of expression for LGBTQ+ individuals. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a large survey module of approximately 29,000 respondents, I find strong support for the notion that Americans consider extremist policies – especially related to abortion – when deciding where to live. As an external validity check, I pair these experimental findings with a novel observational dataset of ≈ 30,000 movers and state-level abortion policies. I find small but significant effects that Democratic women residing in liberal states are indeed relocating to states with abortion bans at lower rates in the aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision. 

The  important role that state-level abortion laws play in characterizing perceptions of state policy extremism has informed several extensions to this research. For example, I’m currently undertaking a project utilizing novel survey data on Americans’ abortion policy perceptions. Using these data – which constitutes the first large-scale survey sample of Americans’ perceptions of state-level abortion policies in the post-Dobbs era – I directly test whether fully delegating abortion policymaking to state governments effectively enhances congruence between opinion and policy. A snapshot of these data is below:

Another line of my substantive research explores how state-level institutional factors shape voter turnout and mass political behavior. My recent publication, “Did Changes to the Voting Rights Act Cause Electoral Backsliding in the States?,” uses synthetic difference-in-differences to test whether the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County ruling led to electoral backsliding in formerly covered states. I find no evidence that backsliding occurred in the absence of the repeal of state-level preclearance regulations resulting from the Court’s decision. I am also collaborating on a large NSF-funded research project exploring how incorporation boundaries affect local political participation. This mixed-methods study utilizes a novel survey sampling frame to investigate how residents of incorporated cities and towns perceive and participate in politics compared to those residing in unincorporated areas.

My methodological focus considers how we might combine survey methods and machine learning/large language models to advance public opinion research. To this end, a growing branch of my work focuses on investigating the utility of using LLM-based ‘silicon samples’ (Argyle et al. 2023) to simulate live human respondents in conjoint experiments. Although silicon samples are certainly not an appropriate large-scale replacement for live respondents, I argue that there still may be immense potential for researchers using this method to alleviate startup costs, particularly for resource-constrained scholars conducting pilot studies and power analyses. I was one of six graduate students invited to attend Cornell’s Thought Summit on the Future of Survey Science in September 2024, where I presented preliminary findings from this project. 

Going forward, I will continue undertaking projects that relate broadly to these themes. You can find a full overview of my research here and links to publications and working papers here.