Welcome to my website! In May 2013, I earned my Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (U.S. Politics & Methodology). After a post-doc at Washington University in St. Louis, I joined the political science faculty at Colorado College as an assistant professor in the fall of 2014, and became an associate professor in the 2019-2020 academic year.

Broadly speaking, I am interested in political behavior, especially in the longitudinal sense. More specifically, my research interests center on ideological identification, public opinion, race, and political psychology. At Colorado College, my project-based and problem-based approach to teaching integrates these topics across all the courses I teach, whether it be in Research Design & Analysis, Ideology in the U.S., Race and Politics or Public Policymaking.

In our 2021 book, The Dynamics of Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press), Atkinson, Baumgartner, Stimson, and I aim to deepen our understanding of political representation in the United States by offering a new, comprehensive theory of public opinion movement. We posit three patterns of change over time in public opinion, depending on the type of issue, that captures the bulk of opinion change in the U.S context: partisan issues, for which we provide a slight, but important, variation to the thermostatic theory of public opinion (Soroka and Wlezien 2010; Wlezien 1995), and offer an “implied thermostatic model”'; nonpartisan issues, for which partisan control provides no clear cue for the public, and opinion moves in less predicable patterns; and, “cultural shift” issues, in which opinion trends steadily in the liberal direction over time.

My book project The Liberal Paradox confronts this question: How can liberal policy programs remain widely supported and liberal politicians continue to win elections when the liberal identity itself is out-favored by the conservative identity nearly two-to-one? I provide novel insight to explain this central paradox of American politics. I begin by building a theory of ideological identification formation at the micro level, drawing from recent findings in psychology, and also considering the powerful agency of the environment in which individuals form attachments. In the second empirical chapter, I return the 1960s, using content analysis to recount the most dramatic shift in ideological identification in history. This endeavor uncovers the birth of the core symbolic meaning of “liberal” that still lives on today, and highlights the central role of the media in shaping individuals’ affects for liberals and the liberal label (see here for a related paper). Likewise, on the heels of these new connotations, liberal elites abandoned the label as a definition for themselves and their policies, despite clear ideological connections. Finally, in the third empirical chapter, I trace the media's presentation of “liberal” to the mass public as a function of moral symbols and rhetoric. My findings suggest that the liberal label, once vacant of meaning, gained substantial substance in the 1960s, and that bundle of images, groups, and characteristics have become evermore central to the label. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the moral language with which elites and the media color the liberal identity has been typically less appealing to self-identified liberals and those predisposed to identify as liberals. These findings offer new insight for understanding the persistence of the unpopularity of liberal in name, yet broad acceptance in substance.