Research & Projects

This project examines how political candidates use religious language—particularly cues aligned with Christian nationalism—and how these cues shape voter behavior. I compiled a dataset of over 5,700 candidate statements from official voter guides in Alaska, Arizona, California, Utah, and Washington, spanning from 1968 to 2022. Using text analysis, I identify common rhetorical patterns, trace the rise of Christian nationalist appeals over time, and examine the policy positions associated with these messages.

To assess how this rhetoric influences voters, I am designing a survey experiment that presents Republican respondents with real-world candidate language. This study will evaluate the impact of these cues on voter preferences and willingness to support candidates. This project contributes to our understanding of how religion and identity are strategically used in campaigns and how they influence democratic participation.

Funded by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Religious language plays a pivotal role in shaping political behavior and attitudes. This study investigates how representatives utilize religious rhetoric when addressing the House floor and their constituents, and how this language is influenced by congressional leadership. The inauguration of openly religious Mike Johnson as House Speaker in 2023 provides a unique case to explore these dynamics. Using difference-in-differences and triple difference models, we analyze House speeches and newsletters from before and after Johnson became House Speaker to assess changes in religious speech between Republican and Democratic representatives. 

Our findings reveal a significant increase in newsletters using religious language sent out by Republicans after Johnson became Speaker, while religious speech on the House floor remains unchanged. Overall, our findings contribute to the literature on the relationship between religion, partisanship, and Congressional leadership, highlighting the potential influence of the Speaker of the House on religious communication to constituents.

Published in Politics & Religion (2025); read the full paper here.

In the past two elections, many conservative Americans have expressed hostility toward votes cast by mail, typically citing concerns about election fraud. Other sources of concern might stem from the threat of losing more elections to the Democrats or falling in line with elite rhetoric, especially that of Donald Trump. Using summaries of previous work in political science, news reporting, and different remarks by Donald Trump as treatment conditions, we test whether hostility toward mail-in voting is reduced by a) correcting misperceptions about the security of election outcomes of mail-in voting procedures, b) establishing key elites' acceptance of mail-in voting in certain circumstances, c) limiting the perceive electoral threat of mail-in voting, or d) some combination of the above.

We find that information treatments alone shift neither favorability toward mail-in voting nor likelihood to vote by mail in the future. However, Republican voters are responsive to information treatments when coupled with pro-mail-in voting statements; when elites are not signaling opposition to vote-by-mail, voters find the information about security and electoral threat more credible and shift their opinions accordingly. However, Republican voters are more likely to oppose restricting vote-by-mail only in the electoral threat condition, suggesting that fear of losing elections, not security, may primarily explain opposition to the franchise. 

Funded by the Stanford Center for American Democracy and Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.