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.
In my dissertation, Explaining the “Party Versus Democracy” Dynamic in Mass Opinion, I develop and validate novel measures of democratic motivation. Across the dissertation, I find evidence for a latent democratic constraint that reveals democratic motivations even when electoral behavior fails to reflect them, drawing on experimental evidence from the United States and observational cross-national evidence from Europe. I also develop a novel measure of democratic support drawing on social identity theory. I term it democratic identification, as a parallel to partisan identification, and validate its cognitive and affective components. I also provide a test of its behavioral and psychological predictive performance alongside existing measures of partisan and democratic support.
My dissertation has been supported by the Andrew W. 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.
In my dissertation, Explaining the “Party Versus Democracy” Dynamic in Mass Opinion, I develop and validate novel measures of democratic motivation. Across the dissertation, I find evidence for a latent democratic constraint that reveals democratic motivations even when electoral behavior fails to reflect them, drawing on experimental evidence from the United States and observational cross-national evidence from Europe. I also develop a novel measure of democratic support drawing on social identity theory. I term it democratic identification, as a parallel to partisan identification, and validate its cognitive and affective components. I also provide a test of its behavioral and psychological predictive performance alongside existing measures of partisan and democratic support.
My dissertation has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and the Humane Studies Fellowship.