Research
I research classic topics in the study of democratic politics: political parties, social organizations, group identities, and political communication. Centrally, my work explores how divides between groups in society develop into divides between parties in the electoral arena, and vice versa. I focus largely on the supply-side of politics (i.e. on parties, rather than voters) and study these topics in macro-historical perspective, drawing comparisons between parties in the early twentieth through to today. A distinguishing feature of my work is the attention I pay to meso-level dynamics; I view patterns of political and social organization as essential features that structure electoral politics.
My ongoing research falls into three broad buckets: I. a book project on party-building and identity politics, II. a set of working papers on the organizational dynamics of the new 'education cleavage' in Western Europe, and III. several ongoing projects on parties' uses of group appeals. This work is detailed below.
In my previous life as a scholar of Canadian political behaviour, I co-authored two articles now published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science. The first article looks at the trade-offs of using different survey modes for the Canadian Election Study, while the second measures the effect of local candidates on Canadian voters’ choices in federal elections.
Book Project
My book project, Identity politics, old and new: Party-building and group mobilization in Western Europe, starts from the observation that challenger parties throughout history have drawn on appeals to group identity -- and narratives of social conflict -- to gain a foothold in electoral competition. Yet they have done so in different ways, emphasizing, alternately, the need to represent a clear ingroup or to repress a set of outgroups. To date, these strategies have been studied in distinct literatures and not theorized as alternate models of group mobilization. I bring them together, conceptualized as alternate styles of 'identity politics', and explore (I.) how both emerge from common processes of party-building and entry, and (II.) how certain constellations of structural and political conditions create fertile ground for one strategy or the other.
Empirically, the project is mixed-methods, combining qualitative case studies of political parties with quantitative analysis of historical and contemporary text corpora, including election manifestos, candidate speeches, and autobiographies. In the dissertation from which the book emerges, I focused on historical cases, comparing processes of party-building and entry of socialist and fascist parties in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. At present, I am working on expanding the project forward in time, incorporating cases of Green, ethno-regionalist, and far right party-building.
The dissertation that this project is based on recently received the Honorable Mention for APSA's Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award, awarded for outstanding doctoral work on European Politics.
Party organization and (neo-)cleavage theory
Coming out of my time as a Max Weber Fellow, I have several papers-in-progress focused on the organizational dynamics of the new 'educational divide' (or 'transnational cleavage') in Western Europe. The organizational rooting of this divide -- reflected in both how social groups are organized and in patterns of party organization -- is much weaker than that which characterized the cleavages of the past. My work seeks to map cross-national variation in the organizational rooting of the educational divide, and to understand the causes and consequences of this embedding. I study this topic across three papers:
Cleavage theory meets civil society: A framework and research agenda (joint work with Endre Borbáth and Swen Hutter; working paper available upon request)
Parties of the lower educated? Cleavage theory and the new far right (working paper available upon request)
Pathways to party-building on the right in Western Europe: A longue durée analysis (major revisions in progress; new working paper to be completed this Fall)
Parties' appeals to social groups
I have projects in several stages (and am also very open to new collaborations!) on measuring and explaining parties' uses of group appeals in their speeches and election materials, both historical and contemporary. My work on this topic explores how group appeals are related to processes of party organization and party system change, with a particular interest in understanding differences between how challengers and established parties employ group appeals. As part of this work, I have an ongoing large-scale project digitizing British election addresses (speeches from district-level parliamentary candidates) from the interwar period, which I began during my PhD. Representative ongoing projects on group appeals include:
How party-building shapes group appeals: Evidence from the British Labour Party (working paper; revisions in progress)
A group by any other name: Concept and measurement in the study of group appeals (with Ronja Sczepanski; working paper to be completed this Fall).
Representational resonance: Tracing the spread of group appeals in British election addresses 1892-1931 (with Julia Leschke; very early stage)