Affiliation(s):

• Wayne State University, Department of Political Science

In one of the major projects on which I am currently working, I examine political consequences of prejudice toward nonreligious people. Nonreligious people are a fast-growing religious minority in the United States and, yet, prejudice toward them continues to be higher than toward almost any other religious minority. To date, scholarship that examines the challenges that nonreligious individuals face when running for political office is very modest and has only focused on attitudes toward atheists – even though the nonbeliever universe is considerably more diverse. I use conjoint experimental design to examine how nonbelievers – atheists and their fellow travelers – are evaluated when they run for political office in the United States. Specifically, I investigate whether and how the label used to describe a candidate’s religious identity (atheist or nonbeliever or secular as opposed to religious or Christian) and the manner in which voters learn about it (directly from the candidate or from the news media or from a political opponent) influence voters’ responses to the candidate. I also consider how the impact of a candidate’s religious identity and source of its disclosure depend on whether voters face the candidate in a primary or a general election and in an election to their state legislature or U.S. presidency. Finally, I examine how the effects of religious identity and manner of its disclosure vary among different subgroups of voters.

My current area of research grows out of my broader research on political and social tolerance in the United States and Poland. Religion-related factors, especially the enthusiasm with which one practices one’s religion, consistently emerge as one of the most important predictors of tolerance. I see my research on attitudes toward nonreligious people in electoral politics in the United States as a natural extension of my interest in tolerance and its political implications.

In addition to researching the dynamics of political and social tolerance, I have a long-standing interest in the role that gender plays in candidate evaluation. Scholarship on how women running for office are evaluated compared to men has blossomed in recent years. Yet, this research has overwhelmingly focused only on the role of gender in political evaluation without systematically considering the ways in which women’s membership in other social groups – whether defined by their race or ethnicity, religion, or age – combine with gender to influence voters’ responses. Scholars writing about gender in electoral politics are increasingly recognizing the importance of studying intersectionality. I have started taking empirical steps in that direction by investigating whether and how the impact of candidate gender varies with their religion and age. I plan to continue writing about this topic.

While there are a lot of exciting new books published recently in my research field of political psychology, one of my all-time favorites continues to be a classic book by John L. Sullivan and his colleagues called Political Tolerance and American Democracy.  Throwing doubt on several decades of previous work on tolerance, Sullivan and his colleagues questioned previous conceptualization and measurement of tolerance, with important implications for their conclusions about how tolerant or intolerant Americans were and what factors made them more or less tolerant.  This groundbreaking work has become a foundation for the study of political tolerance, including my own research, for decades to come.

John L. Sullivan, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and a well-known authority on political tolerance, is my favorite scientist for two reasons. First, he has been a competent and prolific researcher who has spent his professional career studying questions near and dear to my heart. Second, he is the nicest human being at the same time who deserves credit for mentoring not only his own graduate students but other junior scholars who have crossed his path.