I take an interdisciplinary approach to research and identify as methodologically agnostic. I was drawn to sociology by its powerful qualitative narratives of social inequalities and was subsequently floored by quantitative research's ability to provide explanations of mass phenomena. I see both qualitative and quantitative research methods as indispensable means of answering questions I find important. Each of the three papers in my dissertation is quantitative, but other related projects involve textual analysis, experimental, qualitative comparative analyses, and interview methods.
I identify primarily as a political sociologist. I am interested in power and ideology, especially as they pertain to maintaining structures of inequality. This focus has motivated my research on right-wing movements, evangelical orientations toward social welfare attitudes, and collaborative work on racial threat in health policy implementation, the effects of tort reform on interstate attorney migration, and the impacts of diversity in teacher professional communities.
I'm excited to use the skills I've developed as an academic to effect positive change in progressive politics. I detail some high points of my research below.
My dissertation is broadly concerned with the effects of the evangelical Protestant transition into the Republican Party since the 1970s. My research suggests that evangelicals have largely adopted the Republican Party platform, even though non-evangelical Republicans haven't adopted their cultural priorities. In sum, my research supports the notion that evangelical political identity is now solidly Republican, and are likely to remain so. In short, they've transitioned from "evangelical Republicans" to "Republican evangelicals."
The first empirical chapter explores racial, social welfare, and cultural attitudes among evangelicals, comparing them to those of Republicans over the same period. By incorporating aspects of the conflict extension paradigm, I use confirmatory factor analysis to measure change in evangelical attitudes following their movement into the party, along with subsequent attitudinal effects on non-evangelical Republicans. I find that evangelicals have largely adopted the policy attitudes of the Republican Party, but that non-evangelical voters have not adopted evangelicals' cultural priorities.
The second empirical chapter narrows its focus on attitudes toward economic egalitarianism and policy. Economic conservatism, a core plank of the Republican Party platform, has been a major beneficiary of evangelical entry into the Republican Party. There's a lot of debate about the relationship between conservative religiosity and conservative economics, with scholars taking strong stances in opposing directions. The Moral Cosmology perspective posits that orthodox religiosity's commitment to communitarianism leads to more liberal economic attitudes. Contrastingly, the Republican Theology perspective argues that evangelicals have a long-standing attachment to Lockean Individualism that ties them to more conservative economic policy positions. In testing multiple specifications of religiosity, I find that there's no real impact of evangelicalism on economic attitudes or abstract egalitarianism. While there is a bivariate association between evangelical identification and economic conservatism, it washes out upon controlling for race and partisanship, suggesting that it's not evangelicalism or biblical literalism that's responsible for this association, but increasing evangelical association with the Republican Party.
The third paper turns toward issue prioritization among evangelicals, exploring the ways that their description of the "most important problem" facing America has changed over this period. In modeling the issues that evangelicals identify as central to their political identity, I hope to explain shifts in evangelical religiopolitical identity since the 1970s.
Findings suggest that evangelicals had an impact on the issue agenda through the 1990s, but that those gains were wiped out following 9/11, as people's attentions moved elsewhere.
A related project uses topic modeling and qualitative textual analysis to track elite evangelical messaging on economic and social welfare issues, drawing a link between elite messaging and lay attitudes.
Additional lines of research explore state-level implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the wake of the Act's passage and the effects of Moral Traditionalism on students' likelihood of accepting insights from introductory sociology courses.