How does a political language that both parties once shared come to be seen as belonging to one side? I trace this process using a dataset of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1920 to today, combined with an LLM-assisted classification approach that sorts religious language into ten substantive themes (like civil religion, pluralism, and religious liberty) and four broader political functions (whether religion is invoked ceremonially, used to define identity, used to set legal boundaries, or used to justify policy). This lets me move beyond simple word counts and ask not just how often each party talks about religion, but what they mean when they do.
I find that religion didn't become a Republican issue simply because Republicans started talking about it more — both parties actually increased their religious language over time. Instead, the parties increasingly diverged in what that language was doing: Republican platforms increasingly used religion to justify policy and governing authority, while Democratic platforms increasingly used religious language to talk about pluralism, nondiscrimination, and the boundaries between church and state. This pattern — where a shared vocabulary doesn't disappear from one side but instead gets pulled in different directions — offers a model for understanding how other contested political issues become partisan without either party fully abandoning them.
Working paper.
With Julianna J. Thomson
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) and recipient of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion's 2025 Published Student Paper Award. Read the full paper here or a blogpost we wrote about this article here.
With David Magleby
With Independents now making up roughly two-fifths of the American public, does this growing share signal a less partisan, less ideological electorate? We show it does not. Using ANES, CES, and other survey data spanning 1972–2021, we demonstrate that treating Independents as a single, moderate bloc — a common practice in the literature — obscures sharp ideological divides within the group. Independent Democrats consistently self-identify as liberal at rates approaching those of Strong Democrats, while Independent Republicans mirror Weak Republicans in their conservatism; only "Pure" Independents, who lean toward neither party, are reliably moderate. These patterns hold across four decades of survey data and multiple survey instruments. Our findings show that partisan leaners are not a moderating force in American politics — they more closely resemble the partisans they lean toward than they resemble other Independents, challenging analytical conventions that treat all Independents as ideologically interchangeable.
Published in Reconsidering Parties and Partisanship, eds. Chris Karpowitz and Jeremy Pope. University of Michigan Press. 2026.
With Amy Brooke Grauley, Zachary Lien, and Priscilla Ziegler
Scholars typically measure Christian nationalism (CN) using agreement with policy positions or statements linking Christianity to American identity, yet rarely consider whether individuals explicitly self-identify as Christian nationalists. This paper evaluates the analytic value of self-identification by comparing it to scale-based measures of CN. Using data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), and open-ended survey responses, we distinguish between individuals who self-identify as Christian nationalists, those who score high on CN scales but reject the label, and those who reject CN as both an identity and a worldview. We show that CN identity and CN belief are related but distinct, and that self-identification matters most when CN belief is low. Among low-belief respondents, adopting the CN label is associated with markedly different political attitudes, while at high levels of CN belief, identity adds little explanatory power beyond belief. These findings highlight limits of worldview-based measures and demonstrate the value of incorporating identity into the study of Christian nationalism.
Under Review at Political Behavior.
With Sierra Davis-Thomander
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.