What the projects on this page share is a measurement problem: the things that matter most in politics are the hardest to count. Two programs follow from it. The first studies the segregation of political life — the uneven allocation of attention and attachment across group lines, from citizens’ private news diets to national publics and the networks of elites and experts. The second, Conceptualization, Measurement & Validity, builds and tests the instruments the first one needs — because a claim about segregation is only as good as the instrument behind it.

The map in the sidebar travels the same terrain: every node is a page.

The segregation of political life

One concept, observed at three levels and two scopes. The levels are the mechanism: elites and media set the menu, individual choices respond, and those choices aggregate into structures nobody designed. The dissertation runs the full domestic column, paper by paper; the cross-national corpus runs the other.

Domestic — American politicsTransnational — international relations
Supply & cues (macro)Attention setting — does elite conflict capture private attention, or chase it? (Diss. P3)
Congress & technology (ideological)
Anti-Westernism & status-seeking in leaders' speeches (affective)
Sorting & structures (meso)Cultural spillover — does partisan attention sort everyday life? (Diss. P2 · cultural)Epistemic elite networks (network) — transnational in reach, segregated on national lines
Selection & attention (micro)Selective attention — what holds a reader once content arrives (Diss. P1 · informational/affective)Anti-Americanism in citizens' discourse (affective)

Families: Attention Segregation · Cross-National Segregation · Elite & Expert Segregation

Conceptualization, Measurement & Validity

The second program treats measurement as its own object, at every stage of the pipeline — from what a concept means, to the instruments that score it, to whether the scores can be trusted.

StageWorkWhat it does
ConceptualizationWhat Do Experts Mean by Polycrisis?What a concept is, before anyone scores it — an expert community caught mid-formation
MeasurementNetwork Shocks · the dissertation's segregation indices · the classification pipelines behind Congress and anti-AmericanismBuilding instruments where none exist — impulse responses for relational event models, duration-weighted indices, framing classifiers
ValidityStance Is Not a Construct · Political GeometryTesting whether LLM annotations carry the construct — and opening the instrument itself to see what it represents

Families: Conceptualization, Measurement & Validity · Networks & Statistics · AI Interpretability & Evaluation


Selected & recent work

  • Stance Is Not a Construct: LLM Validity Gaps in Annotation Working Paper
    Presented at MPSA 2026; PolMeth and APSA 2026 upcoming
  • How Do Networks Respond to Shocks? Working Paper
    Presented at NetSci 2026; PaCSS 2026 upcoming
  • The Political Geometry of Ideology in LLMs Working Paper
    IC2S2 2026
  • Who Talks to Whom among Transnational Epistemic Elites Online? Working Paper
    Presented at ISA 2026 and MPSA 2026
  • What Drives Anti-Americanism in Turkish Social Media? Working Paper
    with Tuba Ünlü Bilgiç and Zeynep Elif Koç · Presented at ISA 2025
  • How Has Congress Framed Technology? Thirty Years of Floor Speeches In Prep
    with Beatrice Magistro, Sophie Borwein, Bart Bonikowski, and R. Michael Alvarez
  • What Do Experts Mean by Polycrisis? In Prep
    with Sienna Mark, Samantha Holder, Daniel Hoyer, Rod Schoonover, and Daniel P. Aldrich

The full record, including talks and earlier publications, is in the CV (PDF). How these interests evolved over time is in the research story.