LGBTQ Americans participate in politics at rates that exceed non-LGBTQ citizens, rendering this group overrepresented in the US electorate. This pattern is puzzling in light of dominant theories of political behavior that might otherwise predict that a diasporic, demographically diverse, and under-resourced group like LGBTQ Americans would hold a diffuse political identity with dampened participation. The diasporic, un-inheritable nature of LGBTQ identity complicates socialization-based accounts of group identity formation and cohesion, while the under-resourced status of the LGBTQ community might otherwise be associated with dampened participation and political efficacy. This raises the question: what are the forces that motivate the American LGBTQ community to participate in politics at rates exceeding what their material resources and demographic heterogeneity might otherwise predict?

I argue that LGBTQ linked fate – a sense of deep connectedness, shared fate and recognition of marginalized status with other group members – functions as a psychological resource that facilitates the high degree of participation observed in this community beyond what material resources alone would predict. This ability to translate identity-based considerations into a force motivating group political behavior is central to the practice of LGBTQ politics, and likely extends to other underprivileged identity groups. I argue that not only does linked fate motivate political participation, but that the effect of LGBTQ linked fate on behavior is amplified for engagement in non-electoral political behaviors (i.e., protest, boycott, petitioning, etc.) when compared to electoral behaviors like voting.

I leverage existing and original observational data and a series of survey experiments to test these claims. In the first empirical chapter, I examine the distribution, incidence, and predictors of LGBTQ linked fate. I find LGBTQ linked fate to be widespread throughout the community, driven by experiences with discrimination and engagement in the LGBTQ community. In the second empirical chapter, I leverage existing observational data collected across nine surveys (n = 40,878) alongside an original survey of LGBTQ Americans (n = 2,323), to trace the association between LGBTQ linked fate and political participation across sixteen years of US politics. I find that LGBTQ individuals participate in politics at higher rates than heterosexual individuals, and that LGBTQ linked fate is a significant, positive predictor of participation across most years. Finally, I find that linked fate disproportionately predicts non-electoral participation for LGBTQ individuals, suggesting that the mobilizing force of linked fate is most salient for contentious, non-institutionalized behaviors. In the planned third empirical chapter I field a two-stage survey experimental design in which participants complete autobiographical reflection tasks that vary identity salience and threat, testing the direct effect of priming these considerations on intent to participate in a range of political behaviors.

“Unpacking the Lived Experiences and Politics of Black Gay Men,” with Camille D. Burge-Hicks (forthcoming in New Directions in Black Political Psychology Research, University of Michigan Press

How do race and sexual orientation jointly shape the political identities, attitudes, and behavior of Black gay men in the United States? Drawing on original focus group data, this project examines how racial and sexual identity structure group consciousness, experiences with discrimination, and political participation, finding that racial identity functions as the primary driver of these outcomes while the salience of sexuality is context-dependent. This project extends my broader research agenda on identity and linked fate to a population underexamined in both the LGBTQ politics and Black politics literatures.

“Unlinked Fate? Secondary Marginalization and the Boundaries of LGBTQ Linked Fate,” with Sashi Juarez-Galindo

How does experiencing discrimination from within the LGBTQ community shape the development of LGBTQ linked fate? Using data from my original 2026 LGBTQ Linked Fate survey, we examine how secondary marginalization - intragroup discrimination on the basis of racial and/or sexual identity - shapes linked fate among LGBTQ Americans. We find that experiencing either form of discrimination alone is associated with heightened linked fate, but that the experience of both is associated with a significant decrease. This project extends the linked fate framework from my dissertation to the intragroup dynamics that shape the practice of LGBTQ politics. This project is in the analysis stage, and will be under review by Spring 2027.

“Infectious Polarization? Partisan Cues and the Politicization of Health Threats,” with Shana Kushner Gadarian and Devin Caramma (invited to revise and resubmit at the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law). 

How does partisanship shape emotional reactions and attitudes toward public health threats in the context of increasing polarization? While canonical work on emotion and politics posits that anxiety should be a function of risk evaluation of objective health threats, the polarization seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic indicates that partisan identity might shape the risk calculations individuals make in response to health threats. We leverage a seven-wave nationally representative panel survey collected throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside two original vignette survey experiments designed to assess the relationship between partisan elite cues and the development of anxiety toward emerging health threats. We identify significant partisan gaps in anxiety and attitudes toward COVID-19, and argue that when political elites contest the source, significance, and solutions to a health threat, the public mirrors elites in their polarization. Across the two experiments, we show that co-partisan messaging increases anxiety toward framed health threats (e.g., a polio outbreak) and subsequent support for protective policies, but that for unframed threats with little elite contention, anxiety and attitudes track risk evaluation instead. This project highlights the conditions under which health anxiety can be shaped by partisan identity, advancing the political psychology literature while speaking to how a polarized public might respond in future health crises.

Beyond my dissertation and coauthored work, I have served as a Graduate Research Associate on the U.S. Policy Agendas Project (PAP), a subset of the Comparative Agendas Project, a cross-national research project spanning institutions in the US and Europe that tracks policy attention across media and governmental institutions over time. This experience has provided me with substantial training in the management of a large-scale, collaborative research project – skills that I will continue to draw upon as a faculty member. In this role, my primary contribution has been extending the project’s media dataset, coding the policy content of nearly 30,000 New York Times articles according to the project’s framework. As part of this work, I led a revision of the Policy Agendas Project Media codebook to better capture the policy content in media coverage. I have also supervised and trained three undergraduate research assistants in the PAP coding framework, meeting with them for one hour each week to review hard cases, discuss and resolve coding disagreements, and reinforce codebook training. In doing so, I have introduced students to the norms of collaborative, large-scale empirical research while gaining valuable experience mentoring undergraduates in research.

My work on this project has led to my collaboration on two coauthored projects nearing publication. The first, “The New York Times MediaText Dataset: AI Predictions for Policy Topic, Sentiment, and Named Entities on 15 Million Articles (1851–2025),” with Miklos Sebök, Chris Faricy, Laszlo Marcell Kiss, and Amber Morris reflects our effort to train large language models to predict policy content and sentiment across the New York Times corpus, and is currently under review at American Politics Research. The second, “Setting the Gold Standard for Automated Policy Coding: The CAPBENCH-English Benchmark Dataset and Replication Framework for the Comparative Agendas Project,” with Miklos Sebök, Chris Faricy, Sean Theriault, Barbara Babolcsay, Alison Craig, and Daniel Little, is in preparation for a fall 2026 submission to a special issue of PS: Po- litical Science & Politics on validation standards in text-as-data political science. In addition to providing the hand-coded data for these projects, I have contributed to the design of the coding schema used to validate the models’ predictions, participated in decision-making around methods and data collection, and presented this work at CAP conferences at Sciences Po and the University of Konstanz.