Ongoing Projects

Drawing on a quasi-experiment with individual-level data from thirty-five countries (N = 32,080), exposure to attacks on women's rights significantly undermines the United States' democratic standing among European publics. A pre-registered vignette experiment in Britain (N = 2,993) demonstrates that news about attacks on liberal civil and social rights reduces perceptions of the US as a democracy and lowers public willingness to cooperate with it.

Social democratic parties have increasingly adopted restrictive immigration rhetoric in response to radical right challengers' electoral successes. The consequences of accommodation remain contested. This paper leverages a pre-registered quasi-experimental design exploiting within-individual variation from as-good-as-random exposure to UK Labour leader Keir Starmer’s “Island of Strangers” speech -- a major rhetorical turn toward anti-immigration positions. We find that the speech altered aggregate perceptions of Labour’s position on immigration and increased the salience of the issue, but was unsuccessful in boosting support for Labour. Instead, the anti-immigration rhetoric yielded no significant increase in Labour support, significantly reduced Starmer’s personal favorability, and there is suggestive evidence that it benefited the radical right party Reform UK. These findings indicate that social democratic parties may have more to lose than to gain by contesting elections on the terrain of their radical right competitors.

Amid rising support for far-right actors across Western democracies, political parties increasingly adopt hybrid forms of communication that blend liberal and illiberal cues to broaden their electoral appeal. One emerging yet understudied example of such strategic liberalism is econationalism, defined as the coupling of ecological frames with nativist or protectionist policies, which may serve both as a normalization strategy for far-right actors and as a tool of accommodation for mainstream parties. We focus on the latter, testing whether pairing protectionist policies with pro-environmental framing increases support for center-right-led governments engaged in far-right accommodation, using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in Germany. We find no net positive effect of econationalism on government appeal. This null effect arises because pro-environmental framing generates asymmetric responses: it \textit{increases} support among left-leaning, culturally liberal, and environmentally concerned voters while simultaneously \textit{decreasing} support among right-leaning and culturally conservative voters. Econationalism therefore does not make nativist governments more broadly acceptable, but instead generates opposing reactions across ideological groups that offset one another and leave overall support unchanged.

How can liberal democratic actors counter the normalization of exclusionary rhetoric? Femonationalism — using gender equality frames to legitimize anti-immigration positions — has become a prominent tool of radical right and mainstream conservative parties alike. We distinguish content-based rebuttals (targeting empirical claims) from source-based rebuttals (targeting messenger credibility). We test both in a pre-registered audio-video vignette experiment (N=3,994, quota-representative German adults). Respondents watched femonationalist statements by real politicians followed by one of three rebuttals: a factual correction debunking the immigration-violence link, a symbolic critique of low female representation in these parties, or a substantive critique of their conservative gender policies. Results reveal a clear asymmetry: factual counterspeech reduces femonationalist threat perceptions by 16.1% and shifts the perceived social acceptability of anti-immigrant expression from a majority to a minority position, while source-based rebuttals largely fail. Femonationalism's persuasive power lies in its empirical credibility; fact-based counterspeech can restigmatize anti-immigration sentiment.

Across Western democracies, parties with exclusionary agendas have sought to broaden their electoral appeal by coupling anti-immigration positions with broadly supported liberal values. Can exclusionary coalitions broaden their support by deploying strategic liberal rhetoric -- instrumentalizing gender equality or LGBT rights to justify restrictive immigration policies? We test this proposition with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded to 3,994 German respondents, in which participants evaluated hypothetical coalition agreements that varied immigration framing (generic, femonationalist, or homonationalist), policy commitments (pro- or anti-LGBT and gender equality), coalition partners (including or excluding the far-right AfD), and other attributes. Contrary to expectations, we find that strategic liberal framing reduces coalition support. By contrast, genuinely progressive gender equality policies (though not LGBT policies) can increase support for anti-immigration governments, even when they include far-right parties. These findings demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies adopted by exclusionary parties may not provide the electoral dividends they anticipate: voters distinguish between saying liberal things and doing liberal things, with important implications for coalition strategy in multiparty democracies.

Across Western democracies, parties with exclusionary agendas have sought to broaden their electoral appeal by coupling anti-immigration positions with broadly supported liberal values. Can exclusionary coalitions broaden their support by deploying strategic liberal rhetoric -- instrumentalizing gender equality or LGBT rights to justify restrictive immigration policies? We test this proposition with a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded to 3,994 German respondents, in which participants evaluated hypothetical coalition agreements that varied immigration framing (generic, femonationalist, or homonationalist), policy commitments (pro- or anti-LGBT and gender equality), coalition partners (including or excluding the far-right AfD), and other attributes. Contrary to expectations, we find that strategic liberal framing reduces coalition support. By contrast, genuinely progressive gender equality policies (though not LGBT policies) can increase support for anti-immigration governments, even when they include far-right parties. These findings demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies adopted by exclusionary parties may not provide the electoral dividends they anticipate: voters distinguish between saying liberal things and \textit{doing} liberal things, with important implications for coalition strategy in multiparty democracies.

Elite cues signal citizens how to interpret political events through a partisan lens. Do these effects occur in real time? We exploit US president Trump’s unexpected announcement of US military strikes against Iran--made during the fieldwork of a nationally representative survey--to estimate the causal effect of elite cues on opinion formation. Leveraging the temporal discontinuity (in minutes) in exposure to the event, we find that partisan divergence unfolds minutes after the announcement: support for military intervention surges among Republicans but drops among Democrats. These effects are immediate, large, and robust across 28,672 of alternative model specifications and 57,344 identified partisan-based treatment effects. Our evidence provides important quasi-experimental demonstration that elite cues produce immediate partisan divergence in a naturalistic setting, isolated from the media framing and social diffusion that confound longer-interval designs. Our findings suggest that elite signals can polarize US public opinion along partisan lines within minutes of exposure, even before media framing and partisan commentary have had time to diffuse, with implications for democratic accountability in a high-polarization environment.

Novel experimental tests linking class-based descriptive representation to symbolic representation. Individuals who identify as working class believe that working-class legislators represent them better, increasing trust in decision-making. This relationship is strongest among those with a deeper psychological attachment to their class-based identity.