Research

My substantive research agenda lies at the intersection of ideological polarization, mass opinion and political behavior, and state policy; and uses a diverse range of novel data sources and quantitative methods, including conjoint experiments, machine learning applications, and applied causal inference identification strategies, to unpack these issues.

My dissertation work finds that state-level policy extremism now shapes interstate migration and democratic responsiveness in ways earlier work missed, departing from prior scholarship by conceptualizing geographic sorting as a response to policy extremism. Specifically, my job market paper argues that contentious and hard-hitting state policies raise the stakes on where individuals choose to live—especially when these laws are ideologically incongruent with one’s own views on these issues—because they explicitly dictate what residents can and cannot do. To test this theory, I use a conjoint experiment of ∼ 29, 000 respondents fielded through the Civic Health and Institutions Project paired with an original dataset composed of ∼ 30, 000 recent movers and state-level abortion policies. I find strong experimental evidence that Americans seriously consider extremist policies when deciding where to live, as well as small but significant observational evidence that such laws actually drive interstate migration in the post-Dobbs era. These findings challenge prior scholarship finding that individuals do not sort. They also expand our understanding of the implications of ideologically incongruent policymaking to include brain drain and related consequences of politically motivated migration.

Another growing line of my research agenda explores how Americans perceive and react to contentious and highly visible social issues, including post-Dobbs abortion policies and gun control laws in the wake of the March for Our Lives movement. Understanding how these issues shape public opinion and mass political behavior work has important implications for democratic responsiveness and good governance in state policymaking, which I strive to make sense of through these projects.

I am also interested in how state-level institutional factors and policies shape mass political behavior. In a solo-authored article published in Election Law Journal, I use synthetic difference-in-differences (Arkhangelsky et al., 2021) to test whether the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County ruling led to electoral backsliding in once-covered states. While conventional theories of political participation and electoral laws predict that this ruling should decrease voter turnout (and thus, electoral democracy and democratic responsiveness) in affected states, I find no evidence that backsliding occurred in the absence of the repeal of preclearance regulations resulting from the Court’s decision. This unexpected result is not only important empirically but also forces us to reconsider the standard theoretical frameworks of participation within which the non-null predictions were made.

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. I also recently released cjointplots,an R package for beautiful conjoint plotting in R (link here).

Going forward, I will continue undertaking projects related to these themes. I also plan to extend my substantive research into a pre-tenure book project exploring geographic sorting and state-level policy extremism. Given the recent surge in deeply personal policymaking, the question of whether individuals ‘vote with their feet’ now holds new—and higher—stakes that merit deeper exploration. Consequently, I will build off other work on geographic sorting and ideologically driven state policymaking to explore when and how ideological extremism in states fosters politically motivated migration. 

You can find a full overview of my research here and links to publications and working papers here.