A Shock To The System? Assessing the Party System Implications of Europe’s Austerity Doctrine (under review)
Scholars contest the degree to which austerity has electoral costs. However, I argue that the the role of (1) conditionality of supranational bailout loans and (2) the constraints of Eurozone membership has not been fully considered. Rather than focusing solely on austerity, this study examines the political consequences of austerity policies when they are supranationally mandated through bailout programs, regardless of voters’ preferences or governments’ promises to pursue alternative solutions to sovereign debt crises. I argue that Europe’s more coercive brand of austerity politics reflects an ordoliberal ideational norm of supranational economic governance, often framed by European decision-makers as a ‘bitter pill’ for electorates to swallow, particularly in Eurozone states. I argue that Eurozone countries receiving bailouts with supranationally imposed fiscal retrenchment conditions, a more coercive form of austerity, are more likely to experience party system polarization. This occurs as electorates seek to hold incumbents accountable for the pain of austerity, while those incumbents are constrained by Eurozone membership, which severely limits their policy options in response to economic crises. I consider measures of polarization as dependent variables: anti-establishment vote share and left-right polarization. Drawing on evidence from the case of Ireland and employing two-way fixed effects regressions (country and year), I find a strong association between bailouts, Eurozone membership, and increased anti-establishment vote share. However, the effect on left-right polarization is more modest. These findings indicate that ‘challenger’ parties of various ideological persuasions are successfully capitalizing on the political vacuum created by the subsequent loss of support for mainstream parties.
Comparative Homonationalisms of the Far-Right (with Jessica Sciarone) (under review)
In 2015, Donald Trump embraced LGBT voters following the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting, and even advocated against North Carolina's draconian transgender bathroom ban. In 2024, transgender Americans became a central target of his campaign, as he promised to end 'left-wing gender insanity' in the United States. Such anti-trans narratives are also emerging in the Netherlands, where far-right parties with a long history of homonationalist discourse opposing measures to facilitate the changing of one's legal gender. However, the degree to which parties invoke these narratives, and whether they scapegoat transgender citizens in doing so, varies. We argue that this is due to variations in discourse promoted by different nationalist visions of the nation. We theorize two forms: White Christian homonationalism, rooted White Christian Nationalism (Gorski & Perry, 2022) in frontier nationalism and muscular Christianity, and secular homonationalism, grounded in civic secularism and nativist ideals of tolerance (Kešić & Duyvendak, 2019). Using Critical Discourse Analysis of party manifestos and campaign materials, we discuss how these discourses discipline LGBTQ+ identities, particularly TQ+ identities, by reinforcing binary gender norms through national myth-making. Far-right homonationalism constructs the “proper homosexual subject” to legitimize exclusionary nationalism. Masculinity plays a central role in shaping national myths and out-grouping dynamics, with differential implications for how TQ+ identities are framed as threats.
Is there a Taylor Swift Effect? Celebrity endorsement and the willingness to purchase carbon offsets (with Aseem Prakash and Nives Dolšak) (under review)
Taylor Swift, like a lot of celebrities, faces intense scrutiny for her carbon-intensive lifestyle. Yet at the same time, how else is the world's most famous popstar and 2023 Time Person of the Year supposed to commute (with her entourage in tow) to her next sold-out stadium show? Even if you're not Taylor Swift, and you don't have a private plane, you have likely encountered the 'flyer's dilemma', where you balance the convenience of commercial air travel. Carbon offsets have emerged as a commonly-advertised solution to the carbon consumption of air travel. However, they are controversial, and how they work is largely unclear to the public. The impacts of celebrity endorsements are well-studied, finding that celebrity endorsments and information campaigns can serve as important influential tools for public health campaigns and product placements, and can influence public behavior. However, celebrity endorsements can also backfire. This may be particularly true given that celebrities often lead carbon-intensive lifestyles, leading to accusations of 'climate hypocrisy'. We used a survey experiment to compare endorsements for carbon offsets among a representative sample of the U.S. public, finding that celebrities in different sectors (music, sport, film) have a very limited effect on public willingness to purchase carbon offsets.
What determines US public support for climate reparations? Evidence from a survey experiment.
What policy solutions to the climate crisis incur lower political costs for HINGOs? How can humanitarian actors retain credibility and legitimacy while sustaining the resources and public trust needed to deliver aid? Increasingly, climate change is integrated into humanitarian response, and where this work involves advocating for the ‘polluter pays principle’, dilemmas emerge as to which policy measures could incur the fewest political costs. Thus, demands for climate policies vary, as some HINGOs call for increased climate aid, while others call for rights-based framing and ‘climate reparations’. What explains this variation? This study investigates the role of public opinion on HINGO decision making, seeking to explain why HINGOs do not commonly make demands for ‘climate reparations’. Using a survey experiment, I test how demands for different reparative climate justice policies, (1) financial reparations for Global South nations and (2) acceptance of climate migrants into the U.S., affect public support. I find that both issue frames depress public support, but that the public is less supportive of solutions involving the relocation of climate refugees. These results are moderated by the degree of ‘charitable ethnocentrism’ in the public, i.e. the belief that ‘charity begins at home’, as well as other ideational and demographic characteristics. The results highlight the strategic challenges HINGOs face when advocating for redistributive and reparative climate policies, but also indicate that HINGOs could avoid certain political costs by focusing on financial solutions rather than those centered around in-migration, despite the urgency of the problem of climate-related displacement.
Aiding the “Civilized”: Do Humanitarian Aid Appeals for Ukraine suffer from Eurocentric bias?
How can humanitarian NGOs uphold the universalist ethos of humanitarianism when donor preferences, media narratives, and racialized empathy create strong incentives to prioritize Ukraine and frame it differently from other crises? I propose an argument that humanitarian aid appeals are an important advocacy tool used by HINGOs to frame humanitarian aid in a rights-based lens. I also argue that these appeals are not impartial, as they often apply differential framing to similar emergencies. Using an original dataset collected from emergency appeal texts from UK-based HINGOs, I examine whether certain appeals, such as those for Ukraine, demand larger donations, or emphasize cultural proximity, or geopolitical alignment compared to appeals for crises in non-Western contexts.