Research

Peer Reviewed Publications

Who’s Persuasive? Understanding Citizen-to-citizen Efforts to Change Minds, with Martin Naunov and Timothy J. Ryan, Journal of Politics.

Political behavior researchers tend to view persuasion as a top-down enterprise: politicians, journalists, and other “elites” do the persuasion, and citizens listen. Consequently, much research focuses on what makes citizens persuadable. This study shifts our focus to what makes citizens persuasive. We developed an innovative survey design, incentivizing over 400 participants to write messages that would change the opinion of people they disagree with politically. We then presented these messages to survey participants with opposing views, and measured their persuasive impact. Our findings reveal that persuading the other side is possible, with a success rate of almost 30% and only 11% backfire. The most reliable predictors of persuasion success, we find, involve the ability to bridge identity divides through perspective-taking and personal narratives. Finally, we show that citizens are largely unaware of their persuasive potential: unsuccessful senders perceive themselves to be as persuasive as successful ones.

Working Papers

From Adolescence to Adulthood: Depression Symptoms and Partisan Identification

Research in mental health and politics links depression symptoms to a range
of political attitudes, but much of this work has focused on adult populations, overlooking the role of depression as an agent of political socialization earlier in life. Using two nationally representative panel studies, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), I find that the political consequences of depression depend on when in life symptoms occur. Once both adolescent and adult depression symptoms are considered, only symptoms experienced during adolescence, a critical stage in the development of partisanship, predict later partisan identification. Across both datasets, adolescents with strong symptoms of depression are significantly less likely to later identify as Republicans in young adulthood. These results are robust to the inclusion of parental partisanship, the central socializing force in canonical accounts of partisan development.

(Supplementary Information)

Depression Symptoms and Protest Participation

Scholarly research analyzing the effect of depression symptoms on political participation tends to uncover a strictly negative relationship; depression inhibits political participation. Drawing on insights from psychopathology, I suggest that the nature of this relationship may differ for protest participation. Using data from the Spain and the US, I find evidence that those with mild depression symptoms are the most likely to protest, while those with no symptoms and severe symptoms are the least likely to participate. These findings point to the need for the continued study of depression and political behavior in an era of widespread decline in mental health.

Politics Hurts: Mental Well-Being & Latino Trump Supporters Before and After the 2020 Election, with Ryan Brooks and Marc J. Hetherington

Using a two-wave panel conducted before and after the 2020 election, we find that Latinos who supported Donald Trump experienced a marked decline in their mental well-being. We examine Trump-supporting Latinos in 2020, specifically, because it allows us to separate the effect election defeat has on mental well-being from the effect of feared future policy consequences among vulnerable minority group members. Just supporting the loser is sufficient to undermine mental well-being. In the process, we find that pro-Trump Latinos scored much higher in mental health pre-election than pro-Biden Latinos did, a regularity we show to be a function of a range of predictable factors. A study that used a typical post-election survey design rather than a panel study would have missed the election’s effect on losers’ mental health because post-election mental well-being among Trump supporters was still higher than among Biden supporters despite the between-wave drop for Trump supporters.

Depression Symptoms, Anger Reactivity, and Conspiratorial Belief