Research Areas

My research is at the intersection of public opinion and communication. The questions that drive my work have a common focus on how media and framing shape the public’s attitude toward politics, social issues and democratic government. This theme has branched into multiple research streams.

Strategic Communication

My work has a common theme of isolating how message channels and content impact attitudes. Using media psychology and causal inference methods, my research in strategic communication focuses on how message framing can impact reveled preferences toward government. Similarly, my work on the impact of election forecast visualizations emphasizes how the way information is communicated to an audience can improve trust in elections.

Artificial Intelligence and LLMs

A.I has proliferated rapidly and has consequences, both good and bad, for communication research. My research targets alignment of A.I models with different conceptualizations of democracy, to determine whether A.I messaging has the potential to impact political socialization. This project has expanded from western models like Chat GPT and Claude to models from China and Russia such as Yandex and DeepSeek. The driving goal of this research stream is to identify whether A.I from different nations might encourage diverging attitudes on controversial topics.

Digital Media

Digital media has become a primary channel of communication connecting opinion leaders to the public. My research addresses digital media as both a channel of political socialization and a network through which extreme attitudes can reach the mainstream. The focus of this research direction is to incorporate how media ecosystems and the connection between mainstream and fringe social media platforms play a role in attitude formation.

Political Communication & Public Opinion

In the complex political landscape we find ourselves in, there is a growing need for better ways of capturing public opinion. Though there is research suggesting strong support for democracy, both globally and within the U.S, there is less work about how individuals understand democracy. My research diagnoses how conceptualization of democracy impacts support for hybrid regimes abroad, and the struggle between liberal democracy and prioritization of economic well-being at home. I aim to capture the driving factors behind public attitudes toward democracy to improve messaging, defuse perceived polarization, provide common ground and overall communicate more effectively.

Methodologies

My preferred methodologies range from survey experiments, multi-level modeling, conjoint experiments and fixed effect modeling. I’ve worked with World Values Survey data, VDEM data and other large panel datasets. Recently, I have incorporated machine learning and Bayesian statistical approaches into my analyses as well.