Research
Job Market Paper
Black voters’ support for Democratic presidential candidates reached a historic low in 2024, raising questions about the stability of racial partisanship in the United States. This paper evaluates three explanations for this shift: generational turnover, ideological change, and the weakening of socio-political norms discouraging Republican voting. Drawing on Cooperative Election Study data from 2020 and 2024, I find little evidence of broad ideological change: the share of Black respondents identifying as conservative, or endorsing conservative views, has remained steady. Yet those who hold such views have become substantially more likely to vote Republican, signaling a potential erosion of norms rather than an expansion of conservatism, resulting in polarization. By distinguishing between the subgroups of Democratic supporters who remain loyal and those prone to swing, this study illuminates the mechanisms of racial partisan change and contributes to debates on the durability of political identities and the conditions under which realignments occur.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
"Race and Perceptions of Revitalization in the `District of Gentrification'"
with Michael Leo Owens, Nyron Crawford, and Andrea Benjamin
Ethnographies of gentrification, by using interviews, suggest individual and group sentiments about it as a form of revitalisation are heterogenous, even within neighbourhoods experiencing it. Discerning variation and changes over time in citywide sentiments about gentrification, however, is a challenge. It requires city-level survey data, especially longitudinal data, which is scarce. We use novel data from Washington Post surveys of District of Columbia (i.e. Washington, DC) residents between 2000 and 2016 to test predictions of city-level gentrification opinions, deduced from neighbourhood-based ethnographies of gentrification. We observe and emphasise how, over time, race is consistently associated with opinion divergence about gentrification, including perceptions of its inequalities and consequences. Our findings demonstrate the value of citywide surveys for extending empirical findings from neighbourhood-level ethnographies of gentrification.
"The Lab as a Classroom: Advancing Faculty Research Through Undergraduate Experiential Education'" with The Oppression and Resistance Lab
Both undergraduate students and faculty members face a challenging job market that requires innovative approaches to skill development and research products. Moreover, entrenched approaches to research and education reinforce traditional hierarchies, exclusionary norms, and exploitative practices. This article describes a lab-based pedagogical framework designed to support faculty research goals and student learning and, simultaneously, to attenuate patterns of historical exclusion. This approach leverages evidence-based best practices from experiential education, team-based workflows, an understanding of servant leadership, and “whole-person”–style mentorship models. We find that these tools advance faculty research goals (in terms of both quality and productivity), support student learning in ways beyond traditional undergraduate coursework, and disrupt patterns of historical exclusion. We provide qualitative evidence to support our model and discuss the hurdles and challenges still to be overcome.
Under Review
"The Supply of Demands: What Black Lives Matter Demanded in 2020"
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, protests in 2020 mobilized an unprecedented number of Americans, with social media playing a critical role in this surge. While scholars have extensively analyzed online mobilization, little is known about what local activists actually communicated online to generate such widespread participation. This study analyzes the content of Black Lives Matter Twitter accounts from U.S. cities with over 150,000 residents through July 2020 to examine how local chapters framed and facilitated protest during the peak of the movement’s cross-racial and broad public support. The analysis reveals that activists strategically linked national outrage to local political contexts, criticized local officials, invoked historical narratives to contextualize present grievances, and articulated visions of alternative futures. Local chapters also prioritized encouraging both physical and digital participation, using social media as a tool for organizing and narrative-building amid mass mobilization.
"Re-imaging data collection: the promise and pitfalls of using non-state actor media for large-scale event dataset" with The Oppression and Resistance Lab
Non-state actors produce their own media with a scope and frequency unmatched by conventional news. Specifically, can rebel media—which should be understood as propaganda—be used in creating reliable event data sets of ongoing or recent conflicts? We suggest that while rebels do lie, there are certain types of data—where rebels are on the ground, and with whom they fight and collaborate—that will be more accurately represented in rebel-produced media than in news data. Using a novel dataset coded from some 28,000 rebel social media posts during the Syrian civil war (2012-2018), we devise a novel approach to reconstructing networks from event data using latent variables approaches, and test our dataset against existing news-based data sources. Our findings reveal that rebel media can predict many of the relationships found in news media nearly as well as news media can predict itself, suggesting that rebel-generated information is a valuable source of information for understanding conflict and collaboration dynamics in conflict settings.
Working Papers
"When Changing Voters Changes Elections: Evaluating Determinants of Electoral Shift in Georgia, 2016-2022"
Georgia was critical to Democratic electoral gains in national offices in 2020 and 2022. Many attribute Georgia's recent electoral shift to changes in a few historically white counties around Atlanta, but the ongoing trend of Black residents moving to the Atlanta suburbs and significant increases in the state's small AAPI and Hispanic communities also appear to be disrupting Republican hegemony in the state. To better understand the sources of recent electoral change, I replicate and extend recent work by Hill, Hopkins, and Huber 2021 and use individual, precinct, and county-level data across four elections to determine where, when, and how changes in the composition of the electorate contribute to sustained political shifts in Georgia. Voter file data allows me to track residential movement, race/ethnicity, and voter turnout in the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. Using a panel and difference-in-differences approach, I track changes in the racial composition of precincts around Georgia, including the extent to which the data associates electoral change with first-time voters. While increases in a precinct's share of Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters are associated with Democratic gains, this association is primarily limited to existing Georgia voters moving around but not into the state.
"Conditioned to Respond: The Role of Police Violence and Organizing Capacity on the 2020 Uprising Protests" with Shea Streeter
This paper investigates the factors influencing protest activity during the 2020 uprising following George Floyd’s murder. Analyzing a dataset of over 10,000 protests across all US counties and the District of Columbia, we explore the roles of grievances from police killings and local organizing capacity in driving mobilization. We incorporate original data from Black Lives Matter Twitter accounts in 52 cities to assess the impact of social media presence. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find that prior police killings correlated negatively with protest frequency, and the presence of active BLM accounts was associated with fewer protests. In contrast, areas with prior progressive protests exhibited a strong positive correlation with the number of 2020 uprising demonstrations. These results highlight the critical role of established activist networks and suggest that prior movement experience significantly influences the spread and intensity of mobilization efforts.