Research

This job market paper examines when state-led secularization reshapes religious identity and produces political backlash among Muslim populations. It argues that efforts to discipline or displace religious authority can transform religious attachment rather than simply weaken it, with downstream consequences for collective action and support for political Islam. The project speaks to debates in religion and politics, state-building, and the unintended political consequences of secular governance.

Why do natural resources fuel ethnic conflict in some ethnic homelands but not others? This article argues that the answer turns on the boundary between active discrimination and passive powerlessness. Among excluded groups, lootable resources raise conflict risk only where the state actively discriminates, not where groups are merely powerless; among included groups, the same resources predict lower risk. No rival account reproduces this positive/null/negative gradient. The boundary governs whether these groups fight, not what they fight over: petroleum pushes discriminated and powerless groups alike toward territorial conflict, wherever the oil sits. Two-way fixed-effects estimates on 859 ethnic groups in 150 countries (1960–2020) establish both patterns. The conflict-generating mechanism thus lies between a group and its state, so country-level resource-curse measures, averaged across the nation, can miss the within-country boundary that actually divides conflict from peace.

Though political scientists have long explored differing factors that lead to ethnic party success, less focus has been given to explaining variations in levels of support from the target ethnic group. We have developed a new dataset that estimates support among approximately 25 different ethnic groups over the past several decades for corresponding ethnic parties using ecological inference and polls. Through exploration of the impact of electoral systems and other institutions on ingroup support for ethnic parties, we will shed light on the effectiveness of institutions in shaping ethnic party support. In particular, do electoral institutions designed to promote coalition building successfully undermine efforts by ethnic parties to solidify an ethnic base?

Are new immigrants especially likely to have faith in the American Dream—the idea that hard work leads to success? What buoys or erodes this faith across immigrant generations? No prior published research has sought to answer these questions with U.S. representative survey data of immigrant Americans. Drawing on two such surveys, we investigate immigrants’ beliefs regarding economic opportunity and how these beliefs differ within and across immigrant generations. We find that first-generation immigrants are unusual in their commitment to the image of the U.S. as the land of opportunity. In generations that follow, views become more pessimistic. Contrary to conventional wisdom, perspectives on the American Dream in the second generation and thereafter are not correlated with economic success. Rather, younger immigrant generations’ perceptions of economic opportunity are linked to partisanship and, among Black Americans only, racial identity.