1. Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts
    2025, Working Paper.
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    Abstract How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article advances a three-stage model of cohortization, in which salient events produce age differential changes in attitudes, elite cues drive identity-congruent political sorting, and life-course timing regulates whether these attitude changes remain persistent over time. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using five surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2024. The findings consistently show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement—much more so among younger than older individuals. Moreover, the changes persisted for younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, offering a model for understanding how salient events can realign generational divides.
  2. Life-Course Transitions and Political Orientations
    2024, Sociological Science.
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    Abstract Do life-course transitions in adulthood shape political orientations? One framework suggests that life events expose people to new information, allowing actors to assess their political beliefs and preferences in response to these social experiences. An alternative framework suggests that the link between one’s life-course position and personal politics may be ambiguous, and early experiences should be more informative for political orientations. In this article, I use four household surveys across three countries and 40 items on political beliefs and preferences to test whether lifecourse transitions change one’s political orientations. In doing this, I employ difference-in-differences models to identify the effects of six life transitions across family and work domains on a wide variety of propositional survey items. I find that life-course transitions have no substantive influence on political orientations, and the general findings are not sensitive to differences in political interest or the age at which individuals experience these life events.
  3. Religious Belief Alignment: The Structure of Cultural Beliefs from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood
    2022, Poetics.
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    Abstract This article presents an alignment model of cultural formation, arguing that belief systems become increasingly constrained from earlier periods of life-course to adulthood. I show that the pairwise correlations between cultural beliefs increase and the structure of personal culture becomes relatively more aligned before entering adulthood. Moreover, the rate of personal change slows down with each year of age, suggesting that the alignment process is most prevalent in specific socialization periods. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks. I find that the results are robust to sampling variability, population heterogeneity, and item selection.

The Organization of Belief Systems

I examine how belief systems are structured at both the individual and collective levels.
In doing so, I study classic questions about static and dynamic constraint while at the same time arguing for a developmental perspective to answer these questions.

  1. Evaluating Dynamic Constraint in Belief Systems
    2025, Working Paper.
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    Abstract Do political belief systems exhibit dynamic constraint? Drawing on a bounded rationality account of belief formation, I examine whether coordinated belief change occurs when credible information and cross-issue cues target a range of political beliefs. I test this expectation in a pre-registered survey experiment in the United States (N = 2,414), in which participants are presented with factual information about income inequality and social mobility—with and without explicit target cues, which indicate that the two issues are conceptually linked. The information treatments produced large first-stage effects on their respective target beliefs, while leaving peripheral beliefs unaffected. In exploratory analyses, I extend these analyses to economic preferences and people’s self-perceptions of belief consistency. The findings delimit the scope of dynamic constraint and suggest that belief updating may be largely domain-specific.
  2. Measuring Movement in Cultural Landscapes
    2025, Poetics.
    (with Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa).
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    Abstract Culture is often conceptualized as a landscape, where the peaks represent popular beliefs, institutions or practices, while the valleys represent those that receive infrequent attention. In this article, we build on this metaphor, and explore how individuals navigate these cultural landscapes. Using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we follow participants’ survey response trajectories across three cultural domains, each with particular topographical features. We show that movement across cultural landscapes is adequately captured by a gravitational model of change, which specifies transition probabilities among cultural positions as a function of the distance between them and how populated they are. Nonetheless, the kind of movement that such a gravitational model would predict varies widely depending on the initial topography of the landscape. Our work highlights that charting landscapes is not only useful cartography, but also an analytical tool that helps us understand the kind of cultural trajectories we should expect individuals to follow.
  3. Religious Belief Alignment: The Structure of Cultural Beliefs from Adolescence to Emerging Adulthood
    2022, Poetics.
    Print · OSF · Code
    Abstract This article presents an alignment model of cultural formation, arguing that belief systems become increasingly constrained from earlier periods of life-course to adulthood. I show that the pairwise correlations between cultural beliefs increase and the structure of personal culture becomes relatively more aligned before entering adulthood. Moreover, the rate of personal change slows down with each year of age, suggesting that the alignment process is most prevalent in specific socialization periods. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I test these propositions through an analysis of religious belief networks. I find that the results are robust to sampling variability, population heterogeneity, and item selection.
  4. The Organization of Political Belief Networks: A Cross-Country Analysis
    2022, Social Science Research.
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    Abstract Studies on mass opinion conceptualize political ideology as an interrelated network of attitudes, beliefs and values. Using the joint dataset of European Values Study and World Values Survey collected between 2017 and 2020, I ask whether the organization of political ideology depends on the structure of political field. Consistent with the theories of social constraint, I find that in countries with high institutionalization of political parties, the organization of political opinions is more likely to be dense and consolidated. These patterns are robust to a variety of predictors between countries and the results are not sensitive to sampling variability or item selection.

The Formation of Cultural Beliefs and Preferences

How should we understand cultural learning at the individual level?
I examine the mechanisms through which people’s cultural orientations change—or persist—over time, and the life-course dynamics associated with these processes, particularly socialization and cohortization.

  1. Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts
    2025, Working Paper.
    Print · OSF · Code
    Abstract How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article advances a three-stage model of cohortization, in which salient events produce age differential changes in attitudes, elite cues drive identity-congruent political sorting, and life-course timing regulates whether these attitude changes remain persistent over time. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using five surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2024. The findings consistently show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement—much more so among younger than older individuals. Moreover, the changes persisted for younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, offering a model for understanding how salient events can realign generational divides.
  2. The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Panel Data to Understand Individual Belief Change
    2025, Political Psychology.
    (with Pablo Bello and Stephen Vaisey).
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    Abstract We investigate whether studies on political belief change can identify change trajectories at the individual level. Using simulations and case studies, we propose a grid-search framework that allows researchers to evaluate the extent to which their target estimates generalize to their study population. We use simulated datasets to estimate plausible values for how many people changed, how much they changed, and who changed, based on observed response trajectories. Our results suggest that researchers should think carefully about the conditions under which they may make claims about belief change at the individual level. To guide substantive theory-building, we propose a concise diagnostic routine researchers can use to translate their claims into a set of plausible alternatives and evaluate potential generative processes. We provide an R package to help researchers implement this procedure in their own work.
  3. Life-Course Transitions and Political Orientations
    2024, Sociological Science.
    Print · OSF · Code
    Abstract Do life-course transitions in adulthood shape political orientations? One framework suggests that life events expose people to new information, allowing actors to assess their political beliefs and preferences in response to these social experiences. An alternative framework suggests that the link between one’s life-course position and personal politics may be ambiguous, and early experiences should be more informative for political orientations. In this article, I use four household surveys across three countries and 40 items on political beliefs and preferences to test whether lifecourse transitions change one’s political orientations. In doing this, I employ difference-in-differences models to identify the effects of six life transitions across family and work domains on a wide variety of propositional survey items. I find that life-course transitions have no substantive influence on political orientations, and the general findings are not sensitive to differences in political interest or the age at which individuals experience these life events.
  4. Quantifying the Importance of Change for Understanding Differences in Personal Culture
    2023, Working Paper.
    (with Achim Edelman, Kevin Kiley, Isabella Bouklas, and Stephen Vaisey).
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    Abstract When researchers want to understand differences in personal culture—a person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices—how much attention should they pay to adult experience? Recent work has reached substantially different conclusions on this question. We argue that this disagreement is an unintended consequence of the “tournament of models” approach researchers have used, which focuses on whether people change and not how much they change. To advance the theoretical debate, we refocus attention on the relative importance of personal change over time for explaining differences between people. We introduce a new measure for quantifying the proportion of systematic variance in panel data attributable to intrapersonal change. Applying this measure to 609 items from seven surveys in five countries, we find that although intrapersonal change is common, it is generally small in magnitude. As an extension of the theoretical debate, we demonstrate that this measure provides new insights when comparing social groups, showing that intrapersonal change is less common among U.S. college graduates than among those without a college degree. Our findings provide a new perspective on several important theoretical debates, as well as a tool to address new questions.

Explorations in Political Culture

I study political culture in interactions.
In doing so, I look at everyday conversations, conceptions of identity on nationhood and religion, as well as political communications from cognitive authorities.

  1. The Turkish Knowledge Trap: Populist Resentment as Elite-Counterelite Collaboration
    2025, Poetics.
    (with Barış Büyükokutan and Hatice Sena Arıcıoğlu).
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    Abstract We examine how populist politicians in power produce mass resentment of cultural capital-rich counterelites by comparing three battles in Turkey’s culture war. Investigating how these battles unfolded on Twitter and on a very large online forum, we demonstrate that the production of resentment may require the tacit collaboration of the same counterelites that populists demonize. One way for populists to trap counterelites into participation, we find, is by provoking them to participate in encounters that preserve their dominance of objectified cultural capital at the expense of political power. Populism should thus be viewed interactionally: its relative strength is an ongoing, cumulative, and uncertain outcome of numerous three-way interactions in specific, highly variable sites. Since the macrosociological orientation of extant scholarship is unlikely to capture the dynamics of those sites, populism studies will benefit from developing a more substantial microsociological component.
  2. What’re You Talking About? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions
    2025, Sociological Science.
    (with Kevin Kiley and Stephen Vaisey).
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    Abstract Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume that interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such questions become a topic of conversation. Using an original survey of 2,117 American adults, we quantify how often people report discussing the issues tapped by 88 questions in the General Social Survey’s core questionnaire, as well as how often respondents say they individually reflect on these issues, how important they believe them to be, and how sensitive they believe it would be to discuss those issues. We find that the majority of respondents report discussing the majority of issues fewer than once or twice a year, with the modal response that respondents have never discussed an issue in the past year. At the same time, some topics—such as religious beliefs and generic appraisals of political leaders—come up quite frequently, and a small number of respondents report frequently discussing most items. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of belief formation.
  3. Sentiments of Solidarity: Varying Conceptions of Nationhood in Turkey
    2025, Nations and Nationalism.
    (with Tuna Kuyucu).
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    Abstract Studies on nationalism have recently transitioned from macro-level analyses of large structural factors to micro-level examinations, emphasizing nationalism as a set of cultural and political beliefs held by individuals. Such works that use opinion measures to explore heterogeneity in national self-understandings show that nationalist beliefs distribute among the public in particular and non-random ways, though the extent to which these heterogeneities induce variation in behavioural outcomes remains relatively unexplored. In this article, we argue that varying conceptions of nationhood inform ethnonational boundary-making strategies and social action. Using latent class analyses and a resource allocation task in original representative survey data (N = 1,460), we ask whether varying cultural positions on nationhood covaries with preferential behaviour. We found that nationalist cultural models provide heterogeneous cultural templates and lead to preferential treatment of ethnonational ingroups.
  4. Clergy Political Actions and Agendas: New Findings from the National Survey of Religious Leaders
    2024, Sociological Focus.
    (with Joseph Roso and Mark Chaves).
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    Abstract We use the National Survey of Religious Leaders (NSRL) to extend prior research on clergy’s political activism and agendas. We find that christian clergy engage in political cue giving at similar rates across religious traditions, though evangelical clergy are less likely than other clergy to engage in direct action. Regarding issue priorities, evangelical clergy focus almost exclusively on a moral reform agenda, with a particular focus on abortion. Both mainline Protestant and Black Protestant clergy often address a social justice agenda, but Black Protestant clergy tend to focus more on community empowerment while mainline Protestant clergy tend to pursue social justice activism that seeks to transcend class and national boundaries. Catholic clergy are more likely than others to advance a wide range of issues. Taken together, these findings update and extend our knowledge about clergy political activities, broadening the traditional two-agenda characterization of clergy political agendas into a four-agenda account.