Research

Research Agenda

My research explores how national history and other narratives about one's ingroup relate to modern political attitudes and behavior.  How do individuals think about the past, and when does this affect voting behavior or other political attitudes? 

Relatedly, some of these histories have led to stigmatized ideologies and parties. In another strand of research, I explore changing stigma around the radical right and some of its consequences. 

I explore these questions in democratic settings, with projects in Europe (mainly Spain and Portugal), the United States, and Israel. 

My dissertation connects these two phenomena. As a starting point, it validates that nostalgic individuals tend to be the most likely to support the radical right in post right-wing authoritarian settings. Moving beyond this correlation, it then examines whether and how public nostalgia and the success of the radical right feed into one another. From a top-down perspective, it theorizes and tests how the normalization of nostalgic political elites might cause the public to pick up or reject these same attitudes towards the past. From a bottom-up perspective, it investigates how individuals’ nostalgia drives the selection of parties and influences strategic choices by parties. Drawing on survey experiments in Spain and Portugal and cross-national analysis, the project improves our understandings of nostalgia, party politics, and changing social norms.

A copy of my CV can be found here.

In Progress:

Conditionally accepted

• Discounting extreme positions: Party normalization and support for the far right [JEPS] (with Laia Balcells and Sergi Martínez)

Working papers/under review/R&R

• A license to embrace history? Authoritarian nostalgia amid radical right normalization

• Collective victimhood and conflict attitudes: A meta-analysis (with Nadav Shelef and Marko Kljajić)

• Transitional justice and linked party sympathies (with Laia Balcells)

• National identity, past in-group perpetratorhood, and out-group attitudes (with Laia Balcells and Elias Dinas)

•  Uncovering Hidden History: How Past Anti-LGBTQ+ Repression Shapes Modern Attitudes in Spain (with Laia Balcells and Alberto López Ortega)

Published Projects:

Discounting extreme positions: party normalization and support for the far right (With Laia Balcells and Sergi Martínez, PSRM - https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2025.29)

When are far right parties punished for their extreme positions? We argue that the punishments of deviant position-taking are conditional on the degree to which a far right party is normalized or stigmatized in the party system. When the far right is treated as normal, the costs suffered from these parties’ extreme positions decrease, as moderate voters discount the authenticity of their commitment to such positions. We use a survey experiment to test this argument in Spain, finding evidence for discounting on the far right’s extreme anti-LGBTQ+ statements, but not on its embrace of authoritarian history. This study thus shows that normalization and stigmatization of the far right can change how its extreme positions are interpreted by voters.

Re-evaluating the impact of collective victimhood on conflict attitudes: Results from a natural experiment, a survey experiment, and panel study using Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day (With Nadav G. Shelef, AJPS - http://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12906)

A significant observational literature identifies a link between collective victimhood and conflict-enhancing attitudes, though results from experimental work increasing victimhood's salience vary. This article thus revisits this question in two studies in a context in which increased salience is especially likely to shift attitudes. Study 1 exploits the happenstance fielding of 12 surveys over Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day between 1979 and 2021. Using all 192 available estimates assessing hawkishness, preferences for out-group exclusion, and in-group solidarity, it fails to detect statistically significant effects of a state-led effort to increase the salience of Israel's collective victimhood narrative in a natural setting 90% of the time. Study 2 replicates the null findings across multiple comparisons and outcomes in a companion harmonized panel and survey experiment. Substantively, the findings suggest that it may be harder to use short-term manipulations of collective victimhood to shift attitudes than often assumed.

Populism and the Pandemic: France and the Rassemblement National (with Marta Lorimer)

In a book chapter on populist reactions to the pandemic and cross-national report on social media communication, both co-authored with Marta Lorimer (LSE), we explore the rhetoric and actions Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (RN) party throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic. In both pieces, we argue that Le Pen and the RN engaged in a careful strategy of balancing respectability and radicalization. The strategy fits well with the party's attempt to 'de-demonize' itself, a choice driven largely by incentives present in the French electoral system.