I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and I am on the 2026–27 academic job market. My committee is co-chaired by Jae-Jae Spoon and Emily A. West, with Yaoyao Dai and Amanda Lea Robinson.
My primary field is political behavior. My research examines the demand side of democratic backsliding, focusing on how voters experience electoral choices that involve tradeoffs between partisan and democratic principles. In particular, I study how democratic motivations take shape, how they become part of citizens’ self-concepts, and how they interact with surrounding democratic norms under partisan stress. I approach these questions by drawing on both American Politics and Comparative Politics, bringing the two traditions into conversation to develop a richer theoretical and empirical account of democratic citizenship.
My dissertation, Explaining the “Party Versus Democracy” Dynamic in Mass Opinion, is a three-paper project whose first paper has received an R&R at Political Behavior. Across the dissertation, I develop new theoretical and empirical tools for studying democratic motivation. I introduce the concept of latent democratic constraint to capture democratic motivations that may be present even when electoral behavior fails to reflect them, and develop a theory of Democratic Activation to explain when these motivations become strong enough to shape behavior. I test these expectations using experimental evidence from the United States and observational cross-national evidence from Europe. I also draw on social identity theory to conceptualize democratic support as a form of social identification, parallel to partisan identification, and develop and validate novel measures of its cognitive and affective dimensions.
My research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Fellowship and the Humane Studies Fellowship.
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Pittsburgh
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Pittsburgh
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and I am on the 2026–27 academic job market. My committee is co-chaired by Jae-Jae Spoon and Emily A. West, with Yaoyao Dai and Amanda Lea Robinson.
My primary field is political behavior. My research examines the demand side of democratic backsliding, focusing on how voters experience electoral choices that involve tradeoffs between partisan and democratic principles. In particular, I study how democratic motivations take shape, how they become part of citizens’ self-concepts, and how they interact with surrounding democratic norms under partisan stress. I approach these questions by drawing on both American Politics and Comparative Politics, bringing the two traditions into conversation to develop a richer theoretical and empirical account of democratic citizenship.
My dissertation, Explaining the “Party Versus Democracy” Dynamic in Mass Opinion, is a three-paper project whose first paper has received an R&R at Political Behavior. Across the dissertation, I develop new theoretical and empirical tools for studying democratic motivation. I introduce the concept of latent democratic constraint to capture democratic motivations that may be present even when electoral behavior fails to reflect them, and develop a theory of Democratic Activation to explain when these motivations become strong enough to shape behavior. I test these expectations using experimental evidence from the United States and observational cross-national evidence from Europe. I also draw on social identity theory to conceptualize democratic support as a form of social identification, parallel to partisan identification, and develop and validate novel measures of its cognitive and affective dimensions.
My research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Fellowship and the Humane Studies Fellowship.