Publication(s)

Works in Progress

Communications - Political Behaviour: (Social) Media, Participation, and Deliberation

  • (in principle acceptance, Nature) Collaborative and comparative politics work for the Global Social Media Study (institutional sponsor: NYU) exploring the effects of a social media deactivation experiment on a range of political behaviour and attitudinal outcomes.

  • (in progress?) Diana Mutz and I are working on an update to Hearing the Other Side. We are providing a historical comparison between media today and media of two decades ago on their extent of cross-cutting exposure. We will also dive into specific social media analyses to compare between platforms as well as to better understand where social media’s advantage for cross-cutting exposure is coming from. *Presented at the Political Communications panel during MPSA in Chicago, IL (April 2025).

Democracy - Bridging Division, Community based Dialogue, and Civic Engagement

  • (in progress) “The Listening Exemplar: Why Witnessing Cross-Partisan Conversation Matters.” Building on theories of exemplification from media communications and on modelling and mere exposure from social psychology, I hypothesize that watching exemplars engage in listening within cross-partisan conversations can facilitate willingness to engage across political difference. My results show that this is indeed the case. Observing cross-partisan exemplars listening to one another significantly increases viewer’s willingness to engage across party lines. *Presented at the Political Communications panel during APSA in Vancouver, Canada (September 2025).

  • (in progress) “Rethinking Empathy in Politics and Political Science.” Responding to public discourse that calls for more conversations that feature understanding in the fractured American electorate, this paper investigates empathy. Through original data collection and qualitative content analysis, I show the various dimensions of what the public prioritizes in conversations and how they understand empathy. Starting with these common understandings I argue is essential because the experience of empathy is biased based on who is engaging in it and to whom. Thus, situating respondents in pre-set contexts by questionnaires or survey experiments in existing studies can condition particular responses (Sirin et al. 2016; Simas et al. 2017; Clifford et al. 2019). *Presenting at Political Communications panel during MPSA in Chicago, IL (April 2026).

  • (in progress) Scott Williamson and I are working on understanding young people’s changing democratic attitudes and support for democracy. Currently, we are developing a project on partisan hypocrisy and how people decide on penalizing elite anti-democratic behaviour.