Research
All my scholarly publications and books along with links can be found on my Google Scholar page. My current research agenda has three main strands:
1. Politics Makes Us Sick: How Civic Life is Making Americans Anxious, Exhausted and Unwell
This is a book project I’m working on for Johns Hopkins University Press. Here’s the basic precis:
For tens of millions of Americans, politics has become a source of real and lasting harm. Surveys suggest that between 50 and 85 million people blame politics for lost sleep, fatigue, anger, compulsive rumination, and difficulties with impulse control. Research links politics to substance abuse, anxiety disorder, emotional dysregulation, symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, and even heart attacks. One-in-twenty adults report that politics has triggered thoughts of suicide. A rapidly expanding body of academic research converges on the troubling conclusion that contemporary politics is not simply divisive or displeasing, it is actively harming psychological, social, and even physical health.
This suggests politics represents a significant health threat to such a large slice of the electorate. But why? What is it about politics, specifically, that is causing these problems? Are some people being more affected than others? If so, who are they? Is this a new phenomenon? A cyclical one? Is there anything that can be done to mitigate these harms? The central objective of this book is to raise and answer these questions. It introduces the “political stress cycle” as a framework to organize the search for answers. The political stress cycle is a feedback loop where exposure to political information evokes a stress response, the stress response and its associated psychological states lead people to seek more political information which begins the cycle again. Persistent cycling through this loop leads to chronic stress, a condition well-known to cause physical, psychological, and social dysfunction.
If you find this intriguing or interesting, you might want to check out The Political Stress Lab, my Substack newsletter (it’s free), where I write regularly on this topic. Essentially, I am using the Substack as a way to think through some of the big issues and latest research related to the book. I post on the 1st and the 15th of every month.
1. The Morality of Politics
Do our moral beliefs influence our political beliefs? Or do our political beliefs influence our moral beliefs? There is a strong tradition in political psychology that ideology is influenced by our moral values, a tradition that is heavily influenced by the work of Jonathan Haidt (LINK TO MORAL MINDS HERE). In cooperation with other scholars, though, my own research suggests that we are more likely to adjust our moral judgements to fit our core political beliefs rather than the other way around (LINK HERE). Political attitudes are more stable across time within individuals than moral attitudes, and people seem to put similar behaviors in different moral categories depending on the political identity of who is doing them (LINKS HERE). Why is this? Is there any fundamental set of ethical values that can guide politics? Or are most people willing to let politics guide their ethical values? Are political beliefs a form of ethical beliefs? Especially in a polarized era, these strike me as important questions that are worth pursuing.
2. Public Policy
For the first decade or so of my career I focused on public policy, especially among state governments. While I’ve spent much of the last 20-plus years mostly in the world of bio-politics and political psychology, I have never abandoned my original academic interest. I continue to publish and write books in this area, including an award-winning textbook on state politics and policy (Governing States and Localities), and a public policy theory textbook widely used by graduate students (The Public Policy Theory Primer). New editions of both periodically come out and thumbnail descriptions can be found on my books page (LINK HERE).