Below are descriptions of my ongoing research projects. My published work is listed on my CV, which can be found here.

Book

Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust (University of Chicago Press, 2026)

The book asks why political trust and engagement are so unevenly distributed across American communities. I argue that places historically dominated by a single industry — with a focus on Appalachian and Illinois Basin coal towns— inherited captured, low-capacity local governments whose legacies continue to shape citizen behavior generations later. Drawing on archival records, an original dataset of federal corruption prosecutions, and large-scale geocoded surveys, the book traces how industry power becomes baked into political institutions and public mistrust.

Local Government Corruption

A series of papers examines the political and social consequences of corruption in U.S. local governments. Perceptions of Political Problems: The Case of Corruption in U.S. Local Governments (under review) pairs an original dataset of Department of Justice corruption charges since 2000 with geocoded surveys to ask how citizens form perceptions of local malfeasance. Racial Disparities in Public Corruption Prosecutions and Sentencing (with Aaron Kaufman, Mari Pulido, and Mariella Rubenson; in preparation) extends the dataset to examine racial inequalities in how corruption charges are brought and resolved.

Health and Politics

With Neil O'Brian, I study how political polarization shapes health beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes. Our paper “The Political Polarization of Health Outcomes in the United States” is forthcoming at Nature Human Behaviour. A follow-up project, “Increasing Trust in Physicians: Evidence from Five Experiments” (under review), tests interventions that move citizens —including conservative respondents skeptical of medical institutions — toward greater trust in their doctors.

Race, Gender, and Political Attitudes

“Racial Differences in Gendered Political Attitudes” (with Matthew Hayes; under review) examines how standard measures of sexism perform across racial groups in the United States, with implications for how scholars interpret the political effects of gender attitudes.