Research projects
The racial anger gap and enthusiasm advantage in political behavior
I’ve been developing a theoretical framework that explains how race influences individuals’ emotional responses to political developments and cues, both locally and nationally. This endeavor originated with my dissertation, Anger (Mis)Management: Racial Differences in the Emotional Foundations of Political Action. You can read the dissertation here. I expound on that framework in full in my upcoming book The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics.
A sample of my past & current projects exploring the intersection of race & emotion include:
How does race affect the emergence of emotions in response to politics, and the translation of those emotions to behavior?
Black Hope Floats: Racial Emotion Regulation and the Uniquely Motivating Effects of Hope on Black Political Participation
Here I develop a racial emotion regulation model to explain why African Americans can be uniquely responsive to positive prospective political cues. Analyzing data from the ANES & an original experiment I conducted in the Detroit metro area, I show that Black subjects are more participatory than Whites in response to cues of policy opportunity. Thus is because expression of hope mobilize Black subjects to action, while exhibiting no effect on White participation. (R&R)
From Emotion to Action among Asian Americans: Assessing the Roles of Threat and Identity in the Age of Trump (with UCI doctoral student Maneesh Arora)
Using data from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we find Black, Latina/o & Asian Americans all expressing significantly less anger over the 2016 election than Whites. Further, anger mobilizes people of color toward participation much less effectively relative to Whites. We also uncover a strong positive association between expressed fear and participation among Asian Americans. This mobilizing effect of fear distinguishes Asian Americans from other racial groups, providing better insight into the political behavior of this group in contexts of threat. (Published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, 6:3, 357-372, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2018.1494011)
Anger, Agency and Action in Black and White: Racial Efficacy, Emotion & Political Behavior (w/ UCI doctoral student Nathan Chan)
In this ongoing project, we draw on data from the CMPS & an original survey experiment we created to prime different types of anger among Black and White subjects, we demonstrate that African Americans report much less racial group efficacy, relative to both reports from Whites and reports of their own efficacy as individuals. Our racial group efficacy measures are more predictive of a wide range of political activities than the conventional measures. View our 2019 APSA conference paper here.
